For many players, Neighbors from Hell is a beautiful childhood memory, for me too.

As we have a fashion for refreshing old hits today, Handy Games, the current owner of the rights to the brand decided to adapt some of the neighbors to today's standards. But before we move on to the introduced changes, let me, for those who have not had any contact with this series before, I will explain briefly what it is all about. We play the role of Woody, a smart little guy who makes his neighbor's life difficult as part of a TV program.

As part of the television program, he makes his neighbor's life difficult. He sets various traps for him, and the audience watches it through hidden cameras. This is somewhat reminiscent of the motif known from "Home Alone", except that Woody does not defend himself against attackers, he attacks with both simple, harmless pranks in the style of changing whipped cream for shaving foam, but also makes other slightly worse "jokes", for example shocking a neighbor or being thrown overboard of the ship.

Each episode of the program has a leitmotif - the neighbor celebrates his birthday, has to bake an apple pie, etc. We, as a player, walk around his house, setting new traps using the items found and, of course, avoiding detection. Roughly speaking, the game consists of both the first and the second part, only in the second part the action takes place not at home, but on more diverse holiday boards. In the remaster, the gameplay remained the same, which does not mean that nothing has changed until the end. The creators have now given an intro in which it is explained that our protagonist is playing pranks on his neighbor because he was tormented by that neighbor.

Let's start with the basics: at the beginning it's worth noting that the remaster includes both the first and the second part. It combines both scenarios from the first, we smoothly move to the second and it is a very good decision because both parts differed very slightly, so splitting into two separate productions would be pointless. The creators simply moved some of the solutions known from two to one. Gold coins instead of the classic counter, no time limit or up to 3 lives. In the original first part, the setback ended with the necessity to start the game all over again, which was not a major problem due to the small boards and the pace of the game.

As for the graphics, the developers have changed all objects in Full HD from scratch and adapted the game to this resolution. In addition, they doubled the number of frames in animations, thanks to which the characters move more smoothly. On the one hand, that's good, on the other, for me, the original's style was more appropriate.

There are a bit more changes in the game itself. For example, a completely new mini-game has been added - sometimes when we take an item from a clipboard, we have to set 3 the same symbols in one row, a bit like in a one-armed bandit but without a random element. Initially, I liked this solution on average, but actually it's not the worst. The possibility of zooming out the camera has also been added, then you can see the entire board on the screen, which makes the task much easier, because we can easily do our own thing and watch our neighbor from the corner of our eye.

So is it worth reaching for the refreshed version of the neighbors? In my opinion, by all means, especially if you played the original a dozen years ago. Then it will be a really enjoyable journey into the past. Neighbors is still an incredibly playable and satisfying title, its advantage is also the fact that it will be great as a light break from work. The levels are so short that we can easily pass them in a few minutes and get back to work.

I recommend :)

• gaming
• hivegc
• appreciator
• battle