Bonk's Adventure for TurboGrafx-16

Image: MobyGames

Bonk's Adventure

Not quite in Mario's league

Genre: action - platform

Publisher: NEC

Year: 1990

System: TurboGrafx-16

Gameplay Score: 3

Gameplay Notes:

The core mechanic is using your head to attack. You can jump up and hit enemies with the top of your head or press two to head butt or jump and press two to dive bomb with the top of your head. That last mechanic is very difficult to use effectively. Each time you press two you do another 180 roll so pressing it an even number of times means you'll land upright and pressing it an odd number means you'll land on your head. In other words, you have to keep track of the number of times you press this roll button to ensure you don't land improperly and take hits. I felt like James Bond from GoldenEye counting the number of times Boris clicks his pen. Movement is extremely slow and has momentum problems. Attacks and jumps have long animations and your attacks don't have a good range. That all adds up to taking lots of hits and making combat generally difficult. The saving grace is picking up the meat power-ups that let you pause enemies by headbutting the ground or becoming invincible. In the early levels you bide your time until you gain invincibility and can power through the level. In later levels, you rarely get invincibility. This exposes the poor controls.

Level Design Score: 3

Level Design Notes:

Clever but safe level design. There's some memorable moments like climbing into the mouth of a huge dinosaur. Unfortunately a lot of the levels have shaky ground like waterfalls or quicksand or whatever. The controls are slow and cumbersome enough to begin with so these obstacles are particularly annoying.

Theme Score: 4

Theme Notes:

As far as mascots go Bonk is a good one. He's funny. Has great animations and personality to him. There are no NPCs or story so it could be better. But what's here is pretty good.

Art Style Score: 4

Art Style Notes:

Lovely sprite work. Bonk and enemies have many frames of animation and expressive reactions to taking damage. They're as much fun to watch as anything else. Unfortunately the backgrounds, while colorful, don't do much. There is a little bit of animation but no interesting scrolling or effects going on.

Audio Score: 4

Audio Notes:

Nice music. And the sound effects are really well done.

Overall Score: 65

Review ID: 1437