- by Owen Morton
Yes, here we have a review of the brilliant He-Man game, rather clumsily entitled ‘Masters of the Universe: He-Man: Defender of Grayskull’. It came out in late February, and I’ve been ogling it in the shops ever since. Then my friend Mat bought it in WH Smiths in the Easter holidays and I went round to his house and played on it. I got killed by the first baddy. My craving was satiated, for a while. But then, things got worse and worse and eventually, the temptation to actually be He-Man got the better of me. I couldn’t resist.
I don’t know why they couldn’t release this game for the PC. Then I’d have been happy and my financial advisors would have been even happier. But no. It had to be Playstation only, so I had to buy one. And I’m desperately trying to get something worthwhile out of the purchase, so I think the best way to start on that route would be to write a review of it on this website, in the hope that someone will read it and offer me a job as a games reviewer. Though, on the basis of this review, I suspect that’ll be unlikely.
All right. Let’s start with the box. The front doesn’t give an awful lot away, being a picture of He-Man, Castle Grayskull and Snake Mountain. All very exciting – promising, even – but we don’t know what it’s all about. The back is more intriguing. It shows four pictures of in-game action – two of He-Man fighting Skeletor, one of He-Man fighting Beast-Man, and one of He-Man fighting two nameless robots. The impression that this game is slightly fighting oriented is beginning to form. The blurb informs us that Skeletor is about to conquer Castle Grayskull and Eternia, and He-Man must save it. Sounds pretty typical of an episode. You must bear in mind that for someone like me, the chance to control the Most Powerful Man In The Universe on his journey to defeat Skeletor is pretty damn enticing on its own. This is the box that had me drooling crazily in HMV every time I went in there.
The manual is not particularly informative for an individual like myself, who has absolutely no experience of playing games on a Playstation. The setup page is relatively easy to comprehend, since it boils down to ‘Open the drawer. Put the game in. Close the drawer.’ Somehow it manages to take half a page to say this, but probably whoever wrote this bit was being paid by the word. The second and third pages are a little more worrying. They basically detail a huge number of combinations of the buttons on the controller you can press to cause different attacks on the enemies; these attacks are given names like ‘Sword Fury’, ‘Overhead Slam’, Axe Launch’, ‘Shield Smack’ and the rather enigmatic ‘Dragon Slash’. I discovered on playing the game that all you really need to know to fight anyone is to press the X button. Repeatedly. That will probably get you through.
The manual then goes on to rather inarticulately present people with the background to He-Man and Eternia. It’s not well written, and it’s not necessary, because the likelihood of anyone buying this without already knowing about it is rather small. We needn’t discuss the four pages given to the extremely simple Options menu – that even I, a Playstation virgin, figured out without using the manual – nor can I be bothered to talk about the next two pages which inform the reader of the various collectible objects in the game. Then the manual moves on to give us information about the baddies.
Now, I had been under the impression that in a He-Man game, the player might reasonably get involved in beating up (non-violently, of course) the various evil characters we’ve all grown to know and love on the cartoon. This is true, up to a point. Skeletor is, of course, the main baddy at the end of the game, while you do apparently meet Beast-Man and Tri-Klops in the game at some point. Unfortunately, that’s as far as it goes. The rest of the baddies are just silly robots, silly shadowbeasts, silly things called doomseekers, and silly things called Skeletor Skeletons, the latter of which isn’t even grammatically correct, as far as I can tell. There’s also a creature called Sphinx, who has been made up for the game. Well, where’s Evil-Lyn? Where’s Trapjaw? Where’s Whiplash? Where’s any number of the other idiots Skeletor surrounds himself with? If they’re going to release a game for the He-Man fan, they might as well include all the baddies. (They might as well include at least one goody other than He-Man and the Sorceress as well, but I’m getting ever closer to that dangerous trap of ranting on about something which serves only to make me look very sad.)
Then there’s two pages of credits, and two pages that are blank, presumably because you’re supposed to make notes in them. I don’t think anyone would do that in this game. What would you write? ‘Remember to press the X button when being attacked, otherwise you’ll die’? (It’s always possible that these pages weren’t intended for notes, of course, in which case I’m being completely unfair, and bearing this in mind, we’ll move on now.)
So the manual wasn’t particularly inspiring. Still, it’s a game wherein I could play He-Man – wherein I could be He-Man. The problem is, the game doesn’t really make me feel like He-Man. It makes me feel like an idiot who is completely incapable of playing a game. It starts off easily enough. After a movie scene where He-Man goes charging into Snake Mountain like a bull in a china shop and gets captured and stuck in a jail cell, I was placed in control of a large, muscle-bound moron on my television screen. Thanks to a helpful hint provided by the game itself, I discovered that I could knock down the wall of my cell. Silly old Tri-Klops, putting me in a cell with a weak wall like that.
I went out of the cell through the new hole in the wall and went running around in a big arena, in which were also several robots who I killed quickly. After some considerable running round, I found a way into a new room with more robots – whom I also killed – and a key. The key opened a door to another room, in which were some more robots and another key. This key opened another door to yet another room, in which were … guess what?
This sorry state of affairs continued for a little while, since although these robots proved to be little challenge to me – after all, I was the Most Powerful Man In The Universe – there were about a hundred million of them. Still, it was beginning to get that slight bit boring, until suddenly something changed! The game suddenly, without warning, decided that the focus was going to switch from beating robots up to getting past retarded traps. Thus I found myself in a room called The Slime Pit, though it took me about six weeks of fairly continuous play before I caught sight of any slime. (When I finally did, I managed to kill myself in it.)
The traps in this room were stupid. They basically consisted of six tubes which crashed together and separated again. He-Man had to jump between them at precisely the right moment to get past. If he even slightly touched one of them, he died. In real life, it might be a case of him brushing his little finger against a metal tube and thinking nothing of it, but in this game, the same action would lead to him leaping six feet in the air and shouting, “Aaaooohhh!” as he died. Come on, you stupid fellow – you’re supposed to be the Most Powerful Man In The Universe! This isn’t realistic at all, even if you accept all the frankly stupid ideas presented by the series as real.
It took a very, very long time for me to get past this infuriating stage in the game. Some might suggest that I could have easily spent a much more profitable time in those six weeks doing … well, pretty much anything else. I had actually reached this conclusion, and was preparing to sell the game and the Playstation and try to raise a bit of capital, when along came Seb, my famous friend. He got past the six tubes in the Slime Pit within about thirty seconds, only to die in the next trap and give up, proclaiming – quite rightly, I suppose – that the game was rubbish.
Rubbish it may be, but Seb gave me the inspiration to continue playing. I doggedly persisted for a while longer, and eventually I got past the six tubes. The next obstacle was a pit of slime, into which He-Man proved to be remarkably adept at falling, even if you didn’t move him at all. This, of course, proved instantly fatal. In the series, He-Man wouldn’t give a toss if he fell into a pit of slime. He’d probably say, “Gosh, you’re up to your slimy tricks again, Skeletor,” or something equally dimwitted, and climb out. But no. What’s the point in being the Most Powerful Man In The Universe if the computer thinks you can’t do much more than idiots like Mechaneck?
Still, the Slime Pit was eventually negotiated, and out came He-Man, raring for a fight. After charging around some more corridors, collecting keys and killing robots for a while, he emerges into a big arena where Tri-Klops awaits him. He-Man and Tri-Klops spar for a while, and eventually He-Man wins (that is, if you’re pressing the X button enough). He-Man actually kills Tri-Klops, which isn’t really what He-Man would do, and more to the point, rather limits the possibility of Tri-Klops ever appearing in another episode. But enough quibbling, because I want to finish this article sometime this millennium.
After dispatching Tri-Klops in an uncharacteristically violent way, He-Man is contacted by the Sorceress, who tells him a load of rubbish about Skeletor building some towers in the Evergreen Forest, which are designed to suck all the energy out of Grayskull. Oh no. So He-Man “mounts Battle-Cat and rides into action”, as the box puts it. The next level consists of you riding around on Battle-Cat in the Forest. This is as far as I have got in the game, for the simple reason that the Forest is very big and there is no way of telling which way you are supposed to go. It is also full of shadowbeasts, who throw rocks at you from a safe distance and kill you before you can get anywhere near them. Pretty soon, you get bored of this, and turn the game off.
This is what happened to me. The He-Man game is quite decidedly a waste of space. I do not feel like the Most Powerful Man In The Universe. Still, now I have the Playstation, and some other – better – games. Top of the list, of course, is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game: maybe that will make me feel like the Most Powerful Woman In Sunnydale. Or something.