Captain Planet and the Planeteers was a surprisingly popular cartoon in its time. Even with a blatant environmental message that would've turned some people away, it still got multiple seasons and many episodes were aired before its eventual death. Personally, I felt that the cartoon was average at best, although it did have some particularly bad moments. But as history has taught us, when something has any level of popularity, there will be merchandise based on it, and a video game was inevitable. Considering that violence wasn't especially common in the cartoon, how could they make a game based off of it?

Backstory: Human beings are polluting the world, and Gaia will stand for it no longer. She chooses five youths and grants them the powers of Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, and Heart, commanding them to use these powers to save the Earth from becoming uninhabitable with the help of a superhero called Captain Planet.

Graphics: Dark and stylized. Unfitting, but interesting to look at.
Now if there's one thing that doesn't come to mind when I think of Captain Planet, it's dark and gritty, but that's exactly the style that this game's designers went for. It actually looks quite good for NES. The limited color palette was used perfectly to display areas of the world that have been tainted by pollution, especially in the indoor levels, with the poisonous sludge hanging off the ceiling and flowing like a river through the facility. It may be incredibly unfitting for the series that was being adapted, but it looks very good.

+Great art direction
+Limited color palette used effectively
=Dark and gritty style doesn't fit the cartoon it's based on.

Sound and Music: Stylized, but poorly made.
The sound and music is very similar to the graphics: dark and gritty. Unlike the graphics, they weren't used to their full effect. The music in most of the levels just makes you want to mute the sound. It's repetitive and not especially great to listen to. Some of the music is somewhat catchy, but it's ruined by just how quickly and how often it loops over and over again. The sound effects suit the mood, but unfortunately are forgettable at best. Most of the sounds you'll be hearing are explosions coming from defeated enemies, and that sound gets really old really fast. If you have to hear a sound hundreds of times, you could at least make it good to listen to.

+Music fits the mood
-Music is repetitive and loops frequently
-Sound effects are repetitive to listen to

Gameplay: Why?
Now how do you turn Captain Planet into an NES game? Well, according to Mindscape, you just put them into an eco-vehicle and have them shoot things! That's literally exactly the opposite of what the show's supposed to be about! I didn't expect a realistic Captain Planet game, but did they even watch the source material? To their credit, there are objectives other than shooting everything that moves, such as stopping trucks from dumping waste into a park and rescuing wildlife caught in fishing nets, but they're only a diversion from the traditional shoot-em-up gameplay that is offered.

The first level wastes no time pushing you right into the fray, with enemies coming straight at you within a few seconds. Don't you think you could at least give me a little time to learn the controls first? It's annoying to have a game throw you right into a fight so quickly, especially since it only takes one hit to defeat you.

As a shoot-em-up, there were a lot of utterly puzzling decisions that I can't even begin to understand. For starters, the way the five different weapons are handled is bizarre at best. Instead of collecting power-ups to change and upgrade weapons, you have the five elements at your disposal, which you can cycle through with...the Start button. Why Start? Isn't Select supposed to be the button that SELECTS things? It's easy to get Select and Start mixed up in the heat of battle, especially since their functions are swapped compared to any other shoot-em-up ever.

The five elements are severely unbalanced in terms of effectiveness. Heart is only useful to complete certain objectives and nothing else, Wind and Water don't actually harm enemies, and Earth just lobs a rock into the air that then falls straight down. Fire is what you'll be using most of the time, since it actually shoots a projectile straight forward that harms enemies. Wind and Water just waste precious time when you're desperately trying to cycle through your elements to find the one you're looking for before you get killed by the danger in front of you.

There's also a power meter that drains every time you use one of the elements. It's shared between the elements, and if it runs out, you're completely helpless and usually have no option but to commit suicide. There are ways to refill it, but you're unlikely to find them before running out. Why is this limitation even in the game? What other shoot-em-up game has a limit on your ammunition like this?

The game also has a serious flaw with its design: it literally changes its rules with no warning at times. In the first copter level, your objective is to stop the waste trucks from pouring waste into Yellowstone Park, and it's established with the first two trucks that you can only catch up to the trucks because they slow down when you're near the ground. When you reach the third truck, however, it just speeds along no matter how low you fly, and you're supposed to know to use Heart on a bear so that the bear runs up to the truck and clings onto it, slowing it down. Now how would you figure that out on the first try?

Your vehicles don't handle very well, either. They seem to slide about like they have a mind of their own, and that makes dodging enemy fire a real nuisance. Don't even get me started on the underwater level: you have more control over small movements, but it takes a long time to come to a stop after building up momentum, which makes navigating through the small spaces difficult sometimes.

Let's cover one more thing: landing. At the end of each vehicle level, you need to find somewhere to land your vehicle. Sometimes it's as easy as flying into an open tunnel, but sometimes the game decides to be tricky and force you to land in a special spot. If you're even a little bit off, you'll crash into a wall and die, and it's not always obvious where you're supposed to land. Can you imagine how rage-inducing it would be to get through a difficult level, and then die right and the end and have to start it all over again because you couldn't tell where the game wanted you to land?

But that's not all! Every time you finish a vehicle level, the Planeteers summon Captain Planet to save the day, and you'll get to play as him in the next level! He can punch, become a spinning ball of any of the five elements, and fly around very sluggishly. That's pretty much it. Most of the time, you're just floating around punching turrets on your way through the area, sometimes using an element to pass by something that will otherwise block your path. Unfortunately, Captain Planet has one deadly weakness: pollution. Touching anything polluted will drain his life bar significantly, and will kill him very quickly.

The first Captain Planet level is relatively easy to find your way around in, but that all changes very quickly later on. The second Captain Planet level is a maze where I had to die several times just to find the right way through, and the third one is even worse in that regard. Why does it have to be a maze? You'd imagine that these levels would have a lot of ACTION and FIGHTING, but you're instead just left to float around a maze dodging deadly pollution.

Overall, the vehicle levels don't fit the cartoon at all most of the time and the Captain Planet levels are a bit dull and overly mazelike. The gameplay really left me unsatisfied.

+Interesting objectives
-Objectives aren't always self-explanatory
-Overly loose controls
-Mazelike levels
-Doesn't fit the original show at all

Difficulty: This is easily the hardest commercially-released game I've ever played.
This thing makes Dark Souls look average. Every level in this game is incredibly difficult, to the point where you won't even make it halfway through on your first set of lives. Even with five lives and the ability to pick up extras in each level, it's hard to even survive, let alone actually make it to your destination and complete your objectives.

However, a lot of the difficulty comes from not knowing what you're expected to do. For example, in the Eco-Sub level, you'll come across a fan that'll propel you forward at warp speed, sending you either crashing into a wall or a mine. You have to know to go upwards and hold left the entire time, or else you'll either crash straight into a wall or be destroyed by a homing mine. This is the kind of difficulty that this game relies on most of the time.

Don't even get me started on the Captain Planet stages. Sometimes, you practically have to guess what element to use. For example, the second boss has two forms, each defeated with one of the elements. First, you fight Doctor Blight, and guess what element you use against her? HEART. Now, if you managed to figure that out, what element do you use against her evil computer M.A.L.? WATER, which is never used to attack against any other enemy. I had to die several times to figure out what to use.

-Difficulty is incredibly high
-It's high for all the wrong reasons

Overall: This game makes me want to dump toxic waste into the nearest lake.
This is one of those times where you can tell a game was only developed because they thought it would be bought by clueless parents for their kids but it has zero chance of appealing even to kids who liked Captain Planet because of its ludicrously high difficulty. This is a game that nobody should have to play for any reason.

Overall Rating: 2 barrels of toxic waste out of 10

Honestly I never was really a big fan of the show. Not so much because of the environmental message, just because I didn't find the show that good.

I don't remember playing the game very much either mainly because the developer/publisher of the game always seemed to make sub-par games so as kids we knew to stay away from certain companies. Even when I did play it, it was nothing special.

Great job on the review. I look forward to reading more of your work in the future.

Nice work on the review, man. I've never played this game and now I'm glad of that. Lol As for the show, I used to watch it, but I have no idea why. It wasn't bad really, just not good.

Anyway, as I said, you made a good review here. Hopefully we see some more again in the near future.