Hook: Complete Edition – PS5 Review

Hook: Complete Edition is, as the name might suggest, an amalgam of two separate titles. Hook and Hook 2 in fact. Penned as puzzle, casual and brain training on the PSN store, that’s a fair description. OK, review done. This is alright, go play it. Hours of mild diversion.

Seriously though, given it came from Ultimate Games, we half expected Hook CE to be a high-concept fishing game. What it actually is, is a brain teasing puzzle game. It eases you into things fairly well by introducing the basic mechanics, with a generally tougher challenge every ten levels.

The first Hook came out on iOS and Android in 2015 and this is a straight port of it. So much so, that you could easily resort to looking up individual levels if you get stuck. And you probably will. You could mainline this and tear through it in no time, but gallingly, there’s no platinum trophy for your trouble. Is it too much to expect a platinum for your trouble?

The hook part is fairly explanatory as it happens. You remove pins in order to avoid them snagging on one another. Get it wrong, your attempt fails and you start again. As you progress through the game, new mechanics will become available such as rotating switches or circuits that act as repeaters of sorts. It makes sense in practice anyway.

The first eighty levels are comprised of the entirety of Hook, with the latter eighty being all of 2022’s Hook 2. As with the first game, it was developed by Polish solo dev Maciej Targoni AKA Rainbow Train. Unlike the first game, you can rotate the camera. The shift to three dimensions is very welcome and gives a new element to the puzzle solving.

We did find ourselves frustrated on several occasions, moreso during the first eighty levels. This is very much down to the resolutely two dimensional aspect. So as the original Android store page states, the first game is best broken up into chunks.

The second game is much more chill, though our only caveat is that rotating the camera is a bit on the slow side. So sometimes we found ourselves being impatient and taking a chance on a hook that turned out to be the wrong one. No great shakes though. Frustration was less of a factor thankfully.

In conclusion, Hook: Complete Edition is a good puzzle game that is a very generous package for less than the cost of a Tesco Meal Deal and a good deal more satisfying. Though other supermarket meal deals are available. Hook 2 is definitely more fun than the first game, so this is very much a package of two halves.