H.U.R.L.

The Good
The idea behind H.U.R.L. isn't terrible. With 3D shooters having become all the rage, why not let younger kids take part in it by offering a game with first-person shooter mechanics, but replace the bloody violence with a more cartoony kind? Of course, Ken's Labyrinth did this before, and served as an obvious inspiration for this game's creators. Even the power-up vending machines were borrowed. But H.U.R.L. takes the non-violent and family-friendly approach even further. The graphics are brightly colored, the plot innocent and amusing, and the animals you fight against are never really hurt, just annoyed to the point of making them stop attacking you.

Bob the Slob loves to live in filth, has driven everyone else out of town. He is guarded by numerous animals who like things equally grubby. Of course, the underlying educational message is one of personal hygiene and cleaning up after yourself. The way this concept is built into the game is pretty nice, if at times a bit far-fetched. Your ammunition consists of water-balloons, soap bars, and deodorants, with which you rather clean up than attack the hostile animals, which in turn are attacking you with eggs, cigar smoke and the likes. You earn the money to buy this ammunition from the vending machines by picking up litter strewn around the levels. Instead of a health bar, being attacked or entering dangerously dirty territory will increase your dirt level. If it reaches its maximum, you are "slobbed" and will have to restart the level.

The levels themselves are pretty nice as well. There are 10 of them, in environments such as a bus stop, a school, a fast food court, a farm, or the sewers. A couple of stages share their textures and assets, but overall there is little repetition, and the various settings look very much like you would expect them to. The school has libraries and gym halls, the farm has barns and stables, the fast food court has pizza, taco, ice cream, and hamburger shops. I was impressed with the number of different textures for each level, a far cry from the hundreds of seemingly identical rooms of Wolfenstein 3-D and Co. This makes the environments a lot of fun to explore and a joy to look at.

The game also offers some cutscenes. A park ranger gives you hints, and lame excuses for his own laziness. Payphones and intercoms can be used to get messages from Bob the Slob, which are without effect on gameplay but sometimes fun to listen to, and relate to the level the player is currently tackling. There is a surprising amount of voice-overs, in good quality.

The Bad
While the levels are rather beautiful and interesting, they are also very small, and there's only 10 of them in total. A game aimed at children should not be too hard, but there's no reason for it to be this short. On the other hand, pure stretching of material isn't very satisfying either, so I'm really on the fence about this. There's something to be said for knowing when the most has been made out of a scenario, and not boring players by repeating it to exhaustion. It just seems that for the original registration fee of $29.95, being able to complete the game in 1-2 hours would probably have raised some value-for-money gripes with a lot of people. Mind you, a child with no experience playing this kind of game would probably take longer to finish it. But the fun part is not the battle with the animals, it is exploring and finding a way through the levels. This is both not what will be the challenging part to younger players, and also not as exciting the second time around.

You will still replay levels often, but unfortunately that is not thanks to replay value, but bugs. One of the most annoying is that disabled enemies can block essential doorways. Since their bodies block your way, and they can no longer be made to move once you disabled them, you might not be able to pass. This happens all the more often as the animals have the tendency to get stuck halfway when trying to go through doorways, making it that much more likely for them to be in exactly the worst-possible spot when you hit them.

Your own movement isn't unproblematic either. Depending on how close you're standing to a wall or enemy, you often cannot fire. The button simply doesn't respond until you move somewhere else, which is extremely frustrating in the heat of battle. If you manage to fire, the collision detection for your projectiles is very lacklustre as well. If an animal's hit animation is still playing, any following projectiles have no effect, making it very easy to waste valuable ammunition. The zones that register as a hit tend to be smaller than the actually visible part of the animal—unless another animal is hiding behind them, in which case it's not possible to fire past them, since the hit zone suddenly extends several feet to either side.

You can also waste resources by not noticing that your ammunition inventory is capped at 99 per item. The vending machine will gladly continue swallowing your coins, for nothing in return. A minor bug, sure, but very symptomatic for the entire game. For example, the score counter seems to be a 16-bit signed integer. What that means in non-computer-science speak is that once you exceed a score of 32,767, the counter will wrap around to -32,768 and continue counting up towards 0 from there. That would be understandable if scores near 32,000 would only be reachable by the unsavory means of cheating. But my score counter actually wrapped around by level 7, just playing the game as intended. And in the otherwise very commendable save-anywhere feature, you often have to reload a saved game several times until it actually restores the ammunition, money and keys you collected at that point.

Other elements might not be bugs per se, but simply bad and frustrating game design. When finishing a level, you get to take all your ammunition with you, but all your unspent money is taken away. You're not told this anywhere, you have to find out yourself. Similarly, getting "slobbed" and having to restart the level, you lose all your ammunition and money, making some levels impossible to retry without loading a previously saved game.

It's these bugs and annoyances that you keep stumbling upon which give the entire game a very unfinished quality. It feels like no one ever really tested the game before release. How could a tester miss the insufficient range of the score counter if they ever completed the game from start to finish? How could they not be frustrated to the point of changing, or at least mentioning in the instructions, when you will lose all your funds?

The Bottom Line
H.U.R.L. is a very mixed bag, and ultimately the bad parts ruin the fun that the good parts could have provided. The idea was rather good, and the artist and level designer did a brilliant job. The programmer has done well, but his work seems to have been cut short at some point, leaving movement and collision detection in a very unfinished state. The quality assurance finally, if such a thing ever even took place for this game, completely dropped the ball. If playing a game for 10 minutes demonstrates an equal number of annoyances and blatant bugs, someone didn't do their job.

There's no reason why this couldn't have been a thoroughly enjoyable "Wolfenstein 3-D for kids". It all works on paper, and looks good in screenshots. The mistakes are small, but they are in the most devastating parts of the game. As it is, H.U.R.L. is more likely to have turned kids away from playing computer games than having been an enjoyable lesson in personal hygiene.