Only in America can a show about a guy who grunts like an idiot and his family become so popular. Given the wonderfully written stories and constantly recycled jokes like “more power” and “grunt, grunt, grunt” it’s a shame that Home Improvement only lasted a mere eight years. Given its unwavering popularity, it’s only natural that a game based off of all the pivotal plot points of the show would follow. You won’t be battling breast cancer here, nor will you fight the trials and tribulations of your children. Instead you’ll be battling horrible controls, confusing level design, and your ever growing urge to scream.

Home Improvement’s storyline is as thin as the attempt to not make this game look like a marketing cash-in. Tim “The Toolman” Taylor is being honored with his own line of tools and just as he’s about to introduce them, “gasp!”, they’ve been stolen! The only clue that remains is a note telling Tim to search the surrounding (and bafflingly large) movie lot to find his tools. Thus begins one of the most pointless and idiotic games ever conceived.

You’ll guide Tim through a number of confusing and poorly designed levels such as a prehistoric jungle where he must battle dinosaurs and bugs or a medieval set where you’ll fight knights and the like among a few other cliche themed levels. Each level is separated into three increasingly confusing sections where you’ll have a harder race against time and even more frustrating jumping puzzles to endure. Your goal is to collect a set number of crates within the specified time limit. Your life works on the Sonic the Hedgehog scale where you’ll collect random nuts and bolts throughout the level and if you’re hit, you’ll drop them all and have to struggle to pick a few back up so that you can take another hit. This would work well if the nuts and bolts that you drop didn’t fly around with a blatant disregard for physics and disappear after a second or two. If you’re hit while carrying 0 nuts and bolts or you run out of time, you lose a life. Lose 3 lives and it’s game over and you’ll find yourself having to continue at the first section of the level you’re playing all over again. It’s like Sonic sans the speed or fun for that matter.

Tim will need an arsenal of weapons to take down all of the dinosaurs and knights he’s going to come across so what better arsenal than a set of power tools to do the job? You’ll be able to fight with a nail gun, flame thrower, and even the outlandish chainsaw that shoots a fan of electric balls. No matter what weapon you’re armed with, they all seem underpowered and lack any real hit detection. You could stand right up against an enemy and attack, only to have your fire go right through them. You’ll have to position yourself a certain distance away from them to do any kind of damage.

In addition to weapons, you’ll also have a grappling hook so you can reach those hard to reach places, a jackhammer to be rid of those hard to reach bugs and to drill down into hidden parts of a level, and a sledgehammer to take down blocks that may be blocking your way. While the grappling hook can be useful for swinging to platforms that may be out of your reach, it can’t really make up its mind whether it wants to hold on or not…making its use more of a life or death crap shoot than a useful tool. The jackhammer is required to find those precious crates that will end your misery of your current level so that you may move on to a higher plane of frustration, but ground that can be destroyed by it isn’t clearly marked.

As stated before, the levels are horribly designed. It’s bad enough that backgrounds are recycled constantly making every are you go into look the same as before and the arbitrary respawning enemies don’t help to clue you into the fact that you’re gaining any new ground or not. Hills are also abundant, which wouldn’t be so bad if Tim didn’t slip and slide around like he was skating on ice rather than the floor of a jungle set. This especially doesn’t help with the insanely frustrating jumping puzzles the game throws at you where you’ll be doing your fair share of “hail Mary” jumps to nearly unreachable platforms that you can’t get to by means of the grappling hook. You’ll eat up the majority of your time making attempts at these jumps only to miss and have to fight your way back around to the platform to attempt them again. You can try to creep to the very edge to try to make it, but you’ll end up slipping off or not jumping at all thanks to the unresponsive controls. The moral of the story is that your goals are virtually unreachable and not to even try. The game is virtually unplayable, so you’d better have your Game Genie handy for this one.

The visuals are the only plus to all of this madness. Levels are nicely designed when the backgrounds aren’t being repeated like a Hanna-Barbara cartoon and the animation for Tim is well done. There aren’t any neat graphical effects and enemies will just blink when hit.

The sound rivals the gameplay in overall absurdity. Enemies all have generic sound bytes and bugs sound more like alarm clocks than giant prehistoric fire-breathing dragonflies. Tim will give out grunts when hit, but it fails to sound like the coke head we all know and love. The music sets the mood, but loops endlessly and really tends to get annoying.

It’s blatantly obvious that there wasn’t a leg for the Home Improvement game to step on, yet Absolute trudged on. If you check the website of one of the developers, the license was bought, but there were months of deliberation on what the game would be like. After ousting the project lead, they decided to rush out a generic platformer in six months. Kudos to them for making something out of nothing, but this thing was doomed to fail from the start. It all comes down to the marketing geared towards making people buy a game that only loosely resembles the show it’s supposed to represent. Not that the show makes me sick enough, but when you mix in horrible gameplay elements and virtually unreachable goals, maybe then you can understand my overall contempt for this game.

I can only think of two things that bombed harder than this game.

And that should speak volumes....

(Thanks to I-Mockery for getting me the link to the developer site)

- Brad Hicks (Dr. Swank), SwankWorld Media