Uploaded February 2014 | Updated September 2026, 8 hours ago

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Hercules "The Action Game" is based on the Disney movie "Hercules", just as the movie is based on the legend...sounds like a recipe for disaster, but to be fair this is a good game - damn good ! It seems Virgin Entertainment managed to make some good Disney games, as they were also behind The Jungle Book and The Lion King, so this one turned out just as good. It follows the movie pretty well: the levels, the enemies and themes are all based on the movie and it even uses some voices clips taken right from it, most famously Danny DeVito as Philoctetes - the satyr who follows Herc in the training levels and nags you for making mistakes or wasting time. They even included cutscenes from the film and they look really good for the time, though I wish they would've included more of the 5 muses, particularly the "Zero to Hero" song, which was like the highlight of the whole movie. As Hercules, your job is simple: get to the end of each level while fighting enemies. Standing in your way are all sorts of enemies, traps and even bosses you'll have to fight, like the Centaur, the Cyclops and of course Hades himself at the end. The majority of the levels are standard side-scrolling levels, but there are also third-person auto-scrolling levels, where you can't stop or turn around and you have to constantly steer Herc around the obstacles and enemies that come towards you. You have a lot of attacks: Herc can punch, uppercut, and use a variety of swords which you collect along the way. Controlling Herc is OK, although I do feel like there's a slight delay when trying to steer yourself in mid air after jumping or leaping off a ledge. Other than that, no problems: it's really easy to move Herc around and beat the sh!t out of everything you come across. The animation on the characters is well done and the levels are very well detailed, my favorite in particular being the Thebes level. Each level has hidden letters which spell the word "HERCULES". They act as the continue feature, so if you find them all and somehow lose all your lives, you get to try again from the last level you reached, rather than having to start from level. They're usually hidden inside holes in the ground which you access by jumping in place and hitting "down" in mid air. After 3 stomps the ground caves in, revealing a hidden area with goodies. Speaking of which, other items include the "Herculade" drink which replenishes your health, the Hercules action figure which extends your life bar, 3 types of swords (lightning, fire and tornado), an invincibility helmet which makes you immune to damage from enemies and finally urns which represent pieces of the password for the next level - there are 4 of these in each level. Find them all and you'll get the password for that level. On the PSx you also have the option to save your game after each level, whereas on the PC you have to rely solely on the password system. I would've liked the game to follow the movie a bit closer as far as the bosses are concerned: in the movie, Hercules kills the Hydra by punching the side of a mountain, causing rocks to collapse onto the monster. You don't get to do this in the game - you just keep slicing off the Hydra's heads until its energy is drained and a boulder drops onto it automatically. Then there's the Cyclops, another pretty disappointing level: you just get to the end of an auto-scrolling level and you get to watch the scene from the movie where Herc defeats the Cyclops by throwing a flaming stick into his eye. That was some proper violence for a Disney movie - wouldn't it awesome if you got to do that in the game yourself ? The best of all the bosses is probably the centaur: you drain his life by jumping on his back and riding him and also uppercutting him right in the face when you win, like Herc did in the movie - so satisfying ! Also, although this is REALLY nitpicking now, how about being able to play as other characters, not just Hercules ? I know there's not much they could have done for Meg or Phil in the game, but seeing how they took some creative liberties by having Herc fight the Medusa, they could've probably come up with something (in greek mythology, Perseus is the one who fights Medusa, not Herc). A bit of trivia here, this game came out in 1997; 2 years later, in 1999, another Disney game hit the scene: Tarzan The Action Game. It's very similar in terms of gameplay to Hercules and it actually has other playable characters from the film, so we could cut Hercules some slack as far as the characters are concerned, since it came before Tarzan, thus allowing the producers to know what flaws should be ironed over in the future. Other than that, the game is awesome: great graphics, great soundtracks, nice sound effects, smooth controls and most importantly Danny DeVito ! Try it out !