Straight off the bat, I just want to let you know that this game is based on the 1994 film and not the 1960’s sitcom so if you’ve seen the film, then this is the game version of it. To be perfectly honest with you, it’s as good as the film which let’s face it, wasn’t that great (apart from the lovely Erika Eleniak in cut off jeans). Ok, ok, maybe I’m being a little hasty. So let me run through this review and you can either take my word for it or download it and try it out yourself (you may as well, it’s free).
If you’ve never heard of the Beverly hillbillies before, the basic outline of the story is a family of… yep, you guessed it…Hillbillies strike oil on their land and after a major payoff from an oil company pack up and move to…right again…Beverly Hills.
The game starts off with Jed hunting in the forest before he strikes oil and then him and the entire family, Jethro, Ellie May and granny as well including the family dog head off in their rickety car to begin all manor of zany adventures in Hollywood. As I mentioned above, it is the game of the movie so basically if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know the next step in the game so let’s move on to game play.
The graphics are the usual
Amiga/early PC variety for an adventure game meaning the background and characters are quite detailed, but not enough to make out facial features. This doesn’t bother you anyway as it was all about the playability in those days. Unfortunately for this game, the playability is quite poor. The controls are all done by one button, so instead of the old pick up, open, give, use, it’s simply just click to move, click to pick up and click to use an object on something. The worst thing about this is when you are trying to use an object with something, sometimes and for no reason it will drop it back onto the screen. “So what?” you say “just pick it back up” and if it was that easy, I wouldn’t be mentioning it. But sometimes it drops the object behind the scenery, I once spent 5 minutes trying to pick up a squirrel that I had dropped behind the stilling machine. Very frustrating.
And if that’s not bad enough, just when you complete the first bit and are heading off to the hills, you have to navigate your car on the highway by putting it in the right lane. This is demented as it only shows a sign at the top, so you won’t know if you are in the right lane until you stay in it and go back to the start. (This took me half an hour so a little tip for you is change lanes every time you see a sign. Top lane, middle lane, top lane, bottom lane avoiding the truck). The remainder of the game is just collecting things in the hills for certain parts of the story. Some objects are all over the place so be sure to check everywhere.
