Game:

Action Henk (2014)

Category:

Review

Duration: 2:28

1,947 views

105

Developed by Ragesquid, Action Henks slides onto consoles after being out on PC for a while. The object of the Action Henk is to make your way through each of the games 70 obstacle courses, scoring bronze, silver, gold, or rainbow medals, based on low your time is. In order words, its another time trials game. What sets apart Action Henk is the butt slide. You want slide while going downhill and lift up before you drain your momentum. Keeping up the momentum is a big factor in this game. And if you lose it, you might not be able to cross the next gap. Luckily there well-placed checkpoints scattered throughout the courses, so you don't need to worry about getting stuck. There's only a few buttons to learn in Action Henk. You press x to jump, the left trigger to slide, and some later levels allow you to use a hookshot, which can be used with square, and is a lot of fun. There are two quick resets for both checkpoint and startover, which I wanted to reverse. Unfortunately the ps4 version doesn't allow you to remap the controls. I also would have liked to remap the slide the right trigger but whatever. Landing your jump and sliding around feels smooth and exciting. Wall jumping is a little heavy because Henk is fat, so don't expect him to feel like Super Mario or anything. A lot of detail went into the design of Action Henk, visually and mechanically. The backgrounds are full of stuff to look at, and the courses have many subtleties that can only be discovered by going after rainbow medals, which is incredibly challenging. Sometimes it's difficult to see Henk among all the action. The camera gets too far away and his skinny legs make it frustrating to pinpoint jump. There's coin collecting challenges every seven levels to mix thing up a bit, and a fun local multiplayer mode. The leaderboards are all in tact and the time distributions prove how well the game was designed. Overall, Action Henk takes the speedrunner genre and add it's own character to set it apart from the rest. If you know what you're getting into you'll definitely enjoy Action Henk. If you're expecting something like Sonic the Hedgehog you might be left wondering. In fact I've seen too many other reviews comparing this game to sonic which is just asinine, which is part of the reason I felt obligated to make a video review.

http://www.gametestplay.com
https://www.twitter.com/andrewseatone