Licensed platformers were the bread and butter of the Super Nintendo's mid-life cycle, and Hurricanes is a textbook example of this trend. Based on the DIC-produced animated series about a globetrotting soccer team, the game attempts to blend traditional side-scrolling action with sports mechanics. Players take control of various team members as they travel through diverse locales like Giza and the Amazon, battling the villainous Gremmie and his team, the Vicious. While the colorful sprites capture the aesthetic of the 1994 cartoon reasonably well, the game ultimately feels like a generic template with a soccer skin stretched over it.
The gameplay revolves around using a football as your primary weapon, kicking it at enemies and using it to trigger switches. While this sounds like a novel twist on the genre, the execution is hampered by stiff controls and frustrating physics. The ball often feels floaty, and the hit detection when trying to navigate tight platforms while juggling an object can be incredibly unforgiving. Level design is largely uninspired, relying on standard "find the exit" tropes with some light puzzle-solving that rarely challenges the player’s intellect, only their patience with the awkward movement speed and clunky jumping.
Technically, the title sits firmly in the middle of the pack for its era. The backgrounds are vibrant enough, but the animation lacks the fluid charm found in contemporary 16-bit titles like Disney’s Aladdin. The audio is particularly repetitive, featuring a loop of high-energy but grating tracks that will have most players reaching for the volume slider after the second stage. It is a functional piece of software that provides a few hours of distraction for fans of the source material, but it fails to provide a compelling reason for anyone else to choose it over the SNES’s more prestigious platforming library.
