Hambo2 Review by Daniel Simpson

What do you get of you cross a bacon sandwich, various firearms and the Godfather?

To be honest I’m not quite sure myself but my best bet would be something like this.

Hambo2 is a 36 level barrage of bad puns and perplexing puzzles. You play as Hambo, a piggy police officer tackling the gangster swine of the farm, with arsenal of themed weapons Hambo and his faithful assistant Bacon shoot, blow up and bazooka their enemies in a bid for justice. Throughout the game there are various platforms, portals and other elements that get included in physics games such as breakable and slippery surfaces.

What I loved

From as soon as you start up the game you are treated to a cinematic comic in that sets up the storyline, the objectives and plot are solid and I do love the effective use of comics to really bring the story to life. These comics offer you some give you some neat pig puns, the puns can sometimes get annoying. The comics are used effectively and set up the game well.

I love the fact that even though Hambo is a physics based game, the developers make it fun to solve the puzzles as well as just completing them, which is an element that flash physics games today have ignored, Hambo includes this is with it’s jokes and themes (guns and gangsters) which personally I find a better theme than taking red circles off a screen.  

I loved the rage of weapons, from one-shots to automatics to grenades, everything was there. While killing the pigs you would be shooting, throwing, rolling and detonating all of these weapons. And on some of the more complicated levels you can use whatever weapons you want, and in whatever order you want, as long as you can use them effectively. This is great because it gives us some free will when solving the puzzles(so you don’t have to follow one specific route to the finish)

I’ve seen a few games that are like this but none seem to have a feature where you can kill yourself (it sounds weird I know, but it is very true), as well as the enemies, as you have a health bar too. You can die from falling of the level, grenades rolling back to you and when bullets that ricochet hit you. It is interesting because a factor of self preservation is always there so I would be trying harder to aim the grenades.

Even though there is a large inclusion of guns in this game it is done in a manor or way that is child friendly so the game is suitable everyone.    

I’ve played other games that run along similar lines to Hambo such as “Fragger” but this is the only one where the player’s character has to move around the level by causing miscellaneous events to get the best possible shots on enemies.

There is a performance evaluator included into every level, the number of shots is recorded and displayed in the bottom bar next to the weapons, the target number is to the right of it. To achieve a gold standard you must get equal to or below this number of shots to achieve a “Gold standard” performance. I liked the fact that there was a performance evaluator in the game because it gives you targets to aim for but what I really love is that there is only one grade. Other games in this situation may include things like bronze, silver and gold medals. This just makes the targets too complex as I would I much rather just have one target number of shots.   

There is a good simple walkthrough online, it just shows you level after level and what to do. It really comes in handy for a few levels you don’t get or want to get gold standard for. 

There are player designed levels too, some of them are really good, others have too many pigs so they tend to lag a lot.

What I didn’t like and suggested improvements

During game play a large assortment of weapons are used, where there are lots of different types there must be a way to switch weapons, the method to switch weapons in this game is that you click the weapon at the bottom of the screen. This method is really annoying as in times when I only had little time to switch it really wasn’t helpful. It looks a lot the switching method was built for touch screens in minds and it looks like it would be quite fun on a tablet but a laptop touch pad like mine didn’t perform well with this feature. I would strongly suggest using the ‘Q’ and ‘E’ keys because no matter if you have a mouse or touch pad it will still work fine.

For a few levels in the game we see Hambo’s assistant bacon, but after that we never see him again.  I think there should be more levels including him.

A massive problem I have with games is that sometimes when you’re using the tommy gun and miss the target, the bullets are going to deflect (if they hit a wall) what is really annoying is that if Hambo lands on a stationary bullet he dies. This is really annoying, it could be overcome by having a feature where only bullets in motion can kill. This is only my opinion though.

I think there should be some difficulty settings. In these options you could limit ammo to start with or change the Gold standard target.

The wrap up

Hambo2 is a really fun game that has stepped above is prequel, there are good puzzles that are suitably challenging. There is a good use of theme and comics. It can be played and enjoyed by everyone. It has really good replay factor as there are the player made levels. To let you know there will be a Hambo app coming soon to the appstore.