Review: Hooga - Farts Of Fury!
by Allan Curtis
December 8, 2010
Overview
Hooga is a side scroller that feels very much like a classic 16-bit game. As you guide your heroic caveman though forests, deserts, and glaciers you'll encounter plenty of standard platforming perils, including collapsing bridges, deep pits, and enemies that require timing and plenty of dodging.
The Good
To combat your enemies, Hooga has a jumping twirl attack and can use a small collection of thrown weapons, like knives and tomahawks. Hooga also features a special attack when you pick up a bean icon, that lets you don your gas mask and kill all enemies on screen with a devastating fart. He can also collect other powerups for a faster fire rate, or faster speed. Powerdowns also exist that make you fire in a random direction, or slow you down.
Graphically, Hooga is pretty good looking in still screenshots. Environments have plenty of detail and there is plenty to look at and the game's look never feels sterile or repetitive. Hooga as you might have guessed is perfect for younger gamers, as its humor, simple gameplay and bright colors make it a fun romp that anyone can play.
The Bad
Or rather it would be, if the controls weren't garbage. There is something seriously off with the way jumping works in this game and it is way too easy to go hurtling off a cliff during even the simplest jumps. Every action feels stiff and awkward. You'll jump and grab a rope and suddenly plunge to your death, you'll drop like a rock mid jump and fall between platforms, or you'll twirl rather than jump and fall off cliffs. The controls are just too tight and sticky to make this an enjoyable platformer.
Really there is no excuse for this. Hooga brings nothing new to the platformer gene at all and this sort of jump and run gameplay has existed for decades. It should be nigh on impossible to let this enter the App Store, especially for a publisher with the mobile experience of Chillingo.
Enemies are also a total bore to fight. Combat consists solely of standing there or jumping once or twice and mashing the fire button, until one of you die. Enemies never react to your presence, or actually attack you, content to merely pace back and forth, hurting you if you're touched.
Animations as a whole are stiff, Hooga throws tomahawks in a single frame and imitates a penguin when walking, while larger enemies like dinosaurs jerk and twitch along like wind up toys on crack and feature no attack animations whatsoever. They also clip right though each other.
The sound is also poor. Voice samples are scratchy, dinosaurs make virtually no noise, some sound effects don't fit the action at all and the music is bland and repetitive.
The Verdict
Hooga is a strange beast. On paper, it sounds exactly like a hit platformer, but a large collection of flaws render it about as primitive as its protagonist. There are a great number of vastly better platformers on iPhone, most of them will make for a more fun and easily controlled experience. Just don't waste your time on Hooga.
