Neighbors from Hell is a great idea that is executed remarkably well. The game is just way too short.
User Rating: 7.2 | Neighbours from Hell PC
Neighbors from Hell is a game for the mean-natured, sadistic bastard in all of us. The game effectively captures the spirit of a Bugs Bunny cartoon by giving you opportunities to play annoying and often painful cartoonish pranks on your fat slob of a neighbor. This game is a lot of fun for the short time that it lasts. It basically plays out like you would expect from reading an advertisement for the game. At its core, Neighbors from Hell is a puzzle game, and a very easy one at that. You sneak around the house and find objects. You combine these objects with other objects to set traps for your neighbor as he goes through his daily routine. When he runs into a trap, you are rewarded with an amusing animation that shows the trap going off, and then the neighbor losing his temper. They include stuff like replacing his wine with vinegar, replacing fish food with steroids, and getting birds to poop on his clothes. For the most part, the pranks are very easy to figure out, once you watch his routine a couple of times. However, you get bonus points for successfully stringing two or more pranks together in succession. Sometimes you can pull off three or four, and this requires some planning. This feature lends an underappreciated level of challenge to the game. For example, you can spike your neighbor’s beer with laxatives. Then you can stop up his toilet, and put a bar of soap on the bathroom floor. When he drinks the beer, he will run for the bathroom, slip on the bar of soap, and find out the hard way that his toilet is stopped up. This gives you bonus points, and an extra level of satisfaction. Graphics-wise, Neighbors from Hell is good without being spectacular. The game makes up for its lack of technology with some nice animation and art work. The prank animations are particularly well done and amusing. The audio also gets the job done fairly well. A laugh track sounds off when you set a trap or when the neighbor walks into a prank. It is consistent with the theme of the game, which is that you are the sadistic protagonist of a reality TV show. The music is appropriately lighthearted. The game lacks spoken dialog. The closest thing to dialog that it has is the neighbor’s Simlish-like grunts and screams. The biggest problem with Neighbors from Hell is that it is very short, and it has basically no replay value (unless you want to show it to somebody else). Depending upon how hard you try to get a good score for each episode, you can finish the game in 3-5 hours. Then, it kind of just ends with a “congratulations” screen, and you go back to the main menu. It’s too bad that there wasn’t more to this game, because it’s a great idea that is executed remarkably well.
