You are Home Alone with this game.
Kevin McCallister is lost in New York and must the outwit the Sticky Bandits to get back with his family. The source material grasp is very inaccurate. The first half of the movie is skipped over for some reason. Enemies make little to no sense with the game. For example, there are old ladies jumping around, trying to hit Kevin with their umbrellas. Certain enemies such as the large hotel guests and vacuum cleaners can instantly kill Kevin. Slippery physics creates more of a hassle to avoid enemies. He will slightly slip before losing momentum. Keys in this game are enemy projectiles. A first-time player will likely mistake them for an item. Useless weapons: the dart gun only stuns enemies for about three seconds. The slide can be used to kill enemies in some levels, but not all of them. The super fist gun can be wasted if the player uses it too close to the edge of the screen. The pearls only work on a couple of enemies, and it is practically useless after the first level. Unresponsive and poor controls, making something like climbing up ladders a challenge. It's not made clear which parts of the level can be jumped on and which can't. Hitbox issues: Sometimes, when an enemy comes close to hitting Kevin, it counts as a hit. The game's difficulty is completely screwed up. The Hotel, the first level, is the most difficult level due to how many one-hit kill enemies and hazards there are. Worse, there are no continues, meaning once Kevin is out of lives, you are kicked back to the first level. In the NES edition, to board the elevator, you have to hit the elevator button. However, unlike the other two ports, there's no clear indication of how many times you should press it. The graphics are dreadful. For a late 1992 game, the game has sprite work that would have been passable in the mid-1980s. Moreover, not one of the characters' sprites from the movie proper resemble who they're supposed to be. The jump and player damage sounds are taken from The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants (given that both games were developed by Imagineering, this comes off as more of laziness on their part, if anything). The bird lady doesn't even appear in the NES port until the last level. This is despite her graphics being in the game's coding in the sewers part of the second level. The fourth level is supposed to be a chase level but it's bogged down due to Marv or Harry respawning when they're defeated. In the Uncle's House (third level), spin jumping on the wet bandits in some of the rooms causes the game to freeze.