Review of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (NES)

Adventures of Tom Sawyer is an action plat former video game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989 and developed by Seta Corporation. Does it have anything to do with Tom Sawyer? No, not really. Is it a good game? Let's find out.

Story : Well if you're looking for anything Tom Sawyer related, don't look here. Apparently you're a young boy day dreaming in class or in the library or something. And you have dreams about throwing rocks at animals and barrels. This kid is obviously quite disturbed. At least the introductory images look decent.

Graphics : I'm not kidding when I say there's a good chance every graphic in this game was created in a single day. It is that bland. The sprites are generic and have barely any animation to speak of. The enemies suffer the same fate, and the backgrounds are almost solid colors. This is a joke of a game, graphically. Seta Corporation really must not care, judging by the graphics.

Sound : The introductory song is very, very good. In fact the music overall in this game is quite decent. If it were in some other game, I could like it more. As it stands now, the music in this game is the only thing saving it from not being a total waste. There's the bare minimum sound effects wise, but the music is composed well and there's a decent variety of it.

Game play : Be prepared to have your patience tested, because the game play in this game is straight up awful. Doing precise jumps is near impossible, throwing accurate rocks is near impossible, moving where you want is even a pain. Nothing seems to happen when or where you want it to, and the controls alone make the difficulty in this game staggering to the highest degree.

If that weren't enough, the game is insanely difficult as it is! Yes, even if it had great controls you'd struggle to do anything correctly because of the veritable onslaught of enemies coming your way, instant death traps, pitfalls. You can only take one hit and you're sent all the way to the beginning. This game is flat out brutal.

Re playability : I doubt more than two hundred people have ever finished this game, and I can promise none of them have ever played it again. There's your answer.

Overall : 2/10. The introductory song is good, then you can turn this cart off and put something in worth your time.