Neighbours From Hell Hands-On

Live out the American dream! Get even with your neighbor by setting up traps and making his life a real nightmare!

Sabotage your neighbor’s yoga exercise.

I really hate when this happens. Drat!

Bickering with your next-door neighbor is a great way to begin a working day. But, what if things get nasty, and an innocent neighboring dispute turns into real treat of imaginative and scandalous practical jokes. Seriously, I've lost my temper plenty of times on account of stupid and irresponsible freaks that live right next door. Since I'm a respectable citizen and all, I never really got a chance to perform any harebrained schemes that would make my neighbor's life a living hell. Thanks to "Neighbors from Hell," the latest achievement from JoWood Productions and Encore Software, I'll finally be able to experiment with a few vicious ideas. We received the latest build of the game and got a chance to treat the virtual neighbor with an amusing variety of gags and pranks.

Neighbors from Hell was envisioned as a TV show. As the show begins, you enter the abode of a fat, baldy, and smelly guy - your neighboring arch nemesis. This house is where you'll get to perform a series of wicked tasks until a certain amount of time expires. The game is divided into a number of seasons, which are in turn, split up into several exciting episodes of "Neighbors from Hell." Each episode allows you to carry out a sequence of jokes and, as you advance through the series, the challenges and pranks become increasingly difficult to pull off before the chubby neighbor catches you. You control a character named Woody, who is out for some serious revenge and means to booby trap the neighbor's entire home. The quicker you set up traps through the house, the higher your rating will be with the audience.

At first glance the game appears too simple and a little behind the times. Later on you realize that it has just enough challenges and delightful humor to help you pass the time. All the tasks you'll be carrying out during the game don't necessarily involve any out-of-the-ordinary brain teasers - it's more of a "beat the clock, plant the trap, and get the hell out of Dodge" sort of thing. With a rather laidback gameplay and a vast range of hilarious hoaxes and tricks performed by Woody, Neighbors from Hell appeared to have hit the nail right on the head - in an age when technically superior games reign supreme, it truly rekindles the reminiscent of the good-old gaming days. The gameplay is straightforward, offering players an opportunity to sabotage miscellaneous objects located on the neighbor's premises. You'd be surprised how easily your neighbor can loose his temper; it usually takes a few fairly simple gags to annoy him. You can soil his carpet, ruin his cooking, smear his towel with shoe polish, steel his last roll of toilet paper, substitute steroids with fish food, doodle across his family portraits, and so on. As I mentioned earlier, the key task is to get your next-door foe upset in order to achieve higher rating and a higher overall score.

The game also has an intuitive interface, which displays how much time you have left before the episode ends. It also has a parameter, which indicates the degree of your neighbor's rage - if it stays up regularly, the ratings will start jumping through the roof and your character will be encouraged by loud ovations from the studio audience. Another useful indicator on the interface is the cartoonish bubble, appearing above the neighbor's head, telling you what he has on his mind at the moment. The controls were optimized in the old point & click manner, so you won't have any trouble with adapting to complicated commands and too many short-cut keys. Handling Woody is childishly simple and represents yet another positive aspect of the game.

Don’t ever feed your fish with steroids!

Poor guy! It really pains me to see this.

Running around the house won't always be safe, and Woody might often need to seek shelter in a nearby closet or under a rusty old bed. Your overweight arch nemesis will also have a number of pets on guard, which is where another cool element of gameplay kicks in. Basically, in order to avoid being detected by the dog (or the absurdly large parrot), players can utilize Woody's stealth abilities and just slowly creep through pet-guarded rooms. Cool!

Graphics are just what you'd expect to find in a game of this type. During your fiendish endeavors, you are treated to nicely-designed 2D backgrounds, charming characters, and witty cartoon-style animations. Almost every action can cause a certain reaction on-screen. Every room possesses at least one item, which your character may interact with and use to achieve a wide range of evil schemes. Players will never be bothered by severe hardware requirements, loading sections, or bugs. Technically, everything is right where it should be. Also, the sounds represent the pinnacle of the whole experience, with cute jazzy music themes playing in the background and various noises and curses, largely caused by Woody's inspirational dirty scams and tricks. Your enemy will spit, curse, throw up, burp, fart, shout, and shake his fist, wishing he could just grab you by the neck with his greasy fat hands. And, you better pray he doesn't, because once he catches you messing around the kitchen or bathroom (or anywhere else) he'll start beating the living crap out of you... and that'll pretty much spell the end of an episode.

So, in a nutshell, it's really been a while since I've experienced a game as entertaining and laidback as this one. The very notion of a TV show, staring two fundamentally different squabbling neighbors, creates an excellent premise for a video game. Neighbors from Hell stepped onto the gaming scene as a nice break from all the modern-day shooter and RTS clichés out there, and it will surely provide you with enough hours of pure entertainment.