Super Bonk (SNES) review "I liked this series more when it was on the Turbo-Grafx."

In 1994, after three games on the Turbografx-16, as well as a spinoff or two, the Bonk series moved to the Super Nintendo with Super Bonk. Now, a person — at least me! — could find this interesting. After all, Bonk was essentially the flagship platforming series for the TG-16, so how would it fare on a system that already had a well-established series filling that role? Those Bonk games didn’t have the same fame that Mario’s platformers earned, so would this new one give the big-headed caveman a new lease on life or wind up just being a blip on the radar as the series faded to obscurity?

Well, Super Bonk was the next-to-last game released in the series and the final one to reach American stores, so I’d say that answers those questions pretty effectively. And having played it, I can understand this. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, but it is kind of mediocre and, while playing through it, I got the sneaking suspicion the creators were rapidly running out of ideas, desperately flailing and hoping no one would notice. It’s the sort of game that mostly tries to desperately cling to past glory, while managing to falter virtually every time it makes an effort to add something new to its formula.

If you’ve played the TG’s Bonk trilogy, you’ll be familiar with much of what you’ll see. You’ll control the same big-headed caveman as he battles through level after level on his way to a showdown with King Drool. While traveling through those stages, you’ll obtain a variety of power-ups that do varied things such as making him larger or smaller, changing his form and even becoming invincible for a little while. The action mostly remains the same, with Bonk using his head to bludgeon foes, while using hearts and food items to regain health when he gets damaged. He’ll start with three hearts, but has the ability to add to that total by finding special blue hearts scattered through the game’s worlds.

You’ll also recognize a lot of the foes you encounter, ranging from those little helmeted creatures that tend to provide the bulk of the opposition in these games to crawling lizards to those annoying large-mouthed monsters that can swallow Bonk, leading to him having to traverse a small stage to gain his freedom. Oh yeah, by touching flowers scattered throughout the levels, you’ll once again be taken to a variety of bonus challenges where you can win food and smiley faces that act much like coins in a Super Mario Bros. game.

One new thing is the setting, as King Drool sends Bonk through time and the caveman has to work through a number of new locations to reach his nemesis. Only one world resembles the prehistoric setting that dominated previous games in the series. Instead, he’ll travel through a large city in the first world and spend several of the later ones in outer space settings.

At times, this is cool. The city levels were at least a change of pace and a good way to get reacquainted with Bonk and how he controls. I also really liked one short space level where the only thing I had to do was find the door to the next level, as the background was a scrolling map of our solar system. I mean, there was next to nothing to the level, but it looked nice and was a nice break in the action.

However, those space levels can be pretty annoying when low gravity enters the equation and you have to do more than drift around a planetary map. One ingredient that is crucial for a platformer to be legitimately fun is having good controls. Having to travel through stages where you’re stuck having to press on the control pad in an attempt to coax your character into moving in the approximate direction of the place you’re trying to reach while hoping you don’t bump off something and wind up going in the opposite direction is the opposite of that. That’s not the sort of challenge I look forward to when I play this kind of game.

A couple of Bonk’s power-ups also have additional uses that cost a few of those smiley faces. Uses that occasionally become mandatory to advance. With one, you can emit the word “RAGE”, which will travel back and forth like a magic carpet of letters, shrinking every time it hits a character or wall until it’s depleted. A couple levels have signs with “RAGE” written on them — a sign that you’ll need to use this power, jump on the word and use it to leap to ledges you wouldn’t be able to reach naturally. Another gives you the ability to make Bonk intangible, allowing him to cross damaging floors without suffering harm. This is necessary to get through one late-game level. I’d never used this power before, which resulted in me running to the Internet to find out exactly how the hell I was supposed to advance past that really long spike floor.

But probably the worst offender was the boss fights. Most of them either have some sort of annoying gimmick or put Bonk up against foes that only can be hit at specific times. There’s the one that regularly waves a fan that will drain your health and even lower your maximum health until you can find more blue hearts later on down the road. Another one drops small enemies on the ground that you’ll need to use as springboards to reach where it floats high above your head. And the fight with Drool feels like it goes on forever because you can only damage a specific part of his machine and, to do so, have to wait for the rare times when he’s actually stationary.

I get that a series can’t just be the exact same game released over and over, but the ones that have survived and even thrived over multiple generations of gaming systems tend to be the ones that have improved upon their formula when they’ve added to it. This is not that. Awkwardly controlling low gravity levels are not an improvement. Neither are power-ups that are used so rarely as to feel unnecessary or poorly-designed boss fights. At it’s heart, Super Bonk is a Bonk game and is decent, if derivative. However, the main thing this game made me feel was that I should have just spent my time playing Bonk’s Adventure and being able to simply say, “I had fun.” instead of “I had some fun, but…”

Community review by overdrive (February 14, 2026) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.