Like its predecessor, Neighbors from Hell: on Vacation is a guilty pleasure, and good sadistic fun.
The series represents the ultimate guilty pleasure. You get to experience what it feels like to be Bugs Bunny tormenting Yosemite Sam in a Warner Brothers cartoon. This concept is wonderfully executed. This game and the original “Neighbors from Hell” are a couple of the most unique games in recent memory for the PC. It’s too bad that both games are pretty short, but at least this package has a budget price and includes the first game.
In case you are not familiar with this game’s mechanics, it plays a lot like a point-and-click adventure game. You guide Lenny (that’s you) around the screen, looking at stuff, picking up useful objects, and combining your inventory with objects on screen. The idea is to set up pranks that your neighbor then walks into. Most of the pranks involve combining one inventory item with one item in the environment and then waiting for the results. These types are very easy to figure out. There are some though, that require timing and a little bit of thought. “On Vacation” is slightly more challenging than the first game in this way. Each episode also has some kind of hand-eye coordination minigame that you use to pick up an inventory item (e.g. extricating a crab from its nest) – this is new since the first game .
This sequel has fourteen episodes, each of which takes place in some exotic location, or on a cruise ship. The premise is that you have followed your neighbor on vacation as an unwelcome guest, and you’re going to spoil it by sabotaging all of his activities. The pranks are all slapstick-ishly funny and include stuff like coating toilet paper with hot chili (ouch) and rigging loose electrical wires to a puddle of water. As you can see, this is definitely not a deeply intellectual game. This is the cerebral equivalent of men getting hit in the crotch on “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, or toilet humor on South Park.
If you played the first game, then you should know a couple of subtle changes that have been made for this game. For starters, the audience laugh track is gone. I was kind of sorry to see that go. Another change is the addition of the hand-eye coordination minigames that I mentioned above. One improvement to the formula is that the game gives you a special bonus for effectively timing all of your pranks together – the temper tantrum. Basically, your neighbor has a “temper meter” that goes up as you play a prank, and down slowly while nothing is happening. If you line up a bunch of pranks in succession, the meter reaches 100%, and the neighbor blows his top and throws a bonus temper tantrum where he does something like break down and cry or turn red and eat his shoe.
One complaint that I have is that the puzzles seem a little less intuitive and logical this time around. Some of the activities that your neighbor has seem over the top this time, as if the developers were struggling to come up with material. For instance, on one of the cruise ship levels, the neighbor takes stuffed animals and harpoons them out into the ocean. The prank that you play is to attach a rubber band so that the harpoon smacks him in the face. It’s kind of a reach.
The graphics aren’t fancy, but they have a cartoony style that matches up with the game very well. The game makes up for its lack of cutting edge technology with some great art direction. The animations for the neighbor when one of your pranks goes off are the best part of the game. Audio-wise, the game is light-hearted, but nothing really special. When the characters speak, they use that sim-lish that has become so famous. There are a few different musical themes that play throughout the game, depending upon what part of the world you are in.
The best part about “Neighbors from Hell: on Vacation: might be its budget price, and the inclusion of the original game. The 14 “On Vacation” episodes only take maybe 6 or 7 hours to go through, but you get the original game, and the price is pretty low. If you haven’t played the first game, then this package is a great deal. This is a good choice if you’re looking for an easy to play, lighthearted puzzle game.