Grag and Thog Bonkheads combines parts of old concepts and weaves them together to form a very addictive and challenging one or two player adventure. You control Grag, and if someone else is playing they control Thog, both of whom are trolls. You have one goal in mind: killing (kicking) enemies. Using the Super Mario Brothers’ concept of hitting a brick above your head you must time it so that an enemy is on top of that brick when you hit. Successfully completing this renders the enemy unconscious, leaving you to run over him kicking him off the board. Power ups are at your disposal but they come few to a level. Sounds easy, right? It really isn’t, but sure is a lot of fun.
As you enter the world of Grag and Thog you encounter a handful of different enemies and powerups. The game also has, every five levels, a final boss before you can advance to the next world. The enemies’ increasing difficulty and addition to the game (every 2-3 levels a new enemy will appear) is a perfect transition. It doesn’t get too hard too quickly, but it sure isn’t a walk in the park.
Meticulously crafted sprites. The graphics in Grag and Thog Bonkheads are really outstanding for an 8-bit (256 colors) game. The character sprites are sharp, detailed, and concise. While the backgrounds aren’t exactly photorealisitc, they rank up there as some of the best 256 color art that I have ever seen in a game.
The music can get repetitive, it certainly is a bad soundtrack. However I found that I don’t even listen to the music when playing, I’m too engrossed in the actual game play. The sound effects are very accurate for each of the enemies (dogs, raccoons, bees, bouncing tires - to name a few) and are very clear and pleasant to the ear.
 
Scaled 65%
Fun, addictive, and challenging! One of the great features of Grag and Thog is the difficulty. Even the first world posed problems for me - it wasn’t until an hour later that I was even able to beat it. The ‘save-only-after-completing-a-world’ fits right in with the game. It would be too easy for you to simply save the game after completing each level, but completing an entire world is a challenge.
Many people may, just by watching someone play, find Grag and Thog to be a very boring game. But such is hardly the case. The game has to be one of the most fun that I’ve seen in a long time. The addictive nature of the game adds to that enjoyment - you can spend hours playing and you wouldn’t even notice it.
One of the things that I didn’t like about the game was the increasing difficulty in terms of the structures of each board. True, a harder layout poses more of a challenge but trying all you can to try to make it to the top without being killed and then falling off a ledge to the bottom is not only frustrating but also annoying.
The bottom line. All in all, however, Grag and Thog Bonkheads is a very solid game. Combining intricate game play and an easy to learn concept, the game follows the motto “easy to learn, hard to master” perfectly. I highly recommend downloading this demo first, it’ll take you hours to finish it; once you’ve completed the demo, at $24.95, the full version is a steal.
 
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Grag and Thog Bonkheads System Requirements:
• 3 megabytes of hard drive space
• 2 megabytes of RAM
• 13" or larger monitor capable of displaying 256 colors
