In El Gancho, you play as a yellow dinosaur with a bow tie who must explore randomly generated cave mazes as he rescues lost dinosaurs (called Cocos for some reason).  And how do you do this?  By swinging around with a grappling hook!  It’s available on most current consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

Controls are a bit unconventional, but they work for the most part.  You move around with the L stick and jump with the R1 shoulder button.  To aim your grappling hook, use the R stick and launch it with the R2 trigger button.  You can choose to have a helper line to show you where you can grapple or not.  As you swing around the caves, you can pick up food items to boost your HP in case you get hit by an enemy, and there are bullets to find that you can use to fire at them as well.  Another way to defeat enemies is when you are swinging from a grapple, you’ll spray something below you that can defeat enemies as well.  When you rescue all the Coco dinosaurs in a level, you’ll move onto the next.  Some levels you must fight a boss, too.  You can also unlock other playable dinosaurs like one with a propeller beanie which lets you double jump.

I had a few problems with this game.  The pixel graphics have a nice retro look, but sometimes it was hard to tell what was an enemy and what was a dinosaur to rescue.  Play control takes some getting used to, and once you do, it can feel fluid at times and stiff at other times.  Plus I didn’t like how you had to start over at the beginning if you died.  It kept me from enjoying the game more.

Kid Factor:

El Gancho is rated E for Everyone with ESRB descriptors of Mild Fantasy Violence and Mild Blood. If you lose all your HP you just explode into pixels, but I didn’t see any blood.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, and younger gamers may have trouble with the difficult controls.

Tags: Game Reviews