When you play Henry Hatsworth on the Nintendo DS, you might
get the feeling that the platforming and the puzzle game might not be so much
fun on their own, yet for some reason combining them makes them more exciting.
The platforming parts are pretty good, but they over-rely on sections where
your progress is halted while you are forced to take on gangs of enemies that
you've already fought dozens of times. The puzzle game is rather simple, you
can only swap pieces horizontally and it's basically just another game where
you have to line up similar blocks to get them all to disappear. And yet when
you need to swap pieces in a hurry to settle some emergency on the top screen,
things suddenly get a lot more exciting. When things are more urgent everything becomes much more engrossing. Everything still feels just a hair
disjointed though. When you switch from the platforming to the puzzling it sometimes feels like you're switching over to a different game for just a second even though the two parts directly affect each other. It's like they melded the two nearly compatible genres
together as well as possible.
Really, the game's biggest problem is repetition. You'll run into the fights
against gangs of enemies at least three or four times a stage towards the later
stages, which can become frustrating. On top of this, there aren't that many
different kinds of enemies, although the game does a good job of gradually
introducing new foes as you go farther and farther into your adventure. When
you reach the last world the difficulty really gets ratcheted up a great deal,
which can make the last few stages feel like a bit of a drag. The game, like any
good block puzzle, is at its best when things get sped up. The more frantic you
are in trying to get things done in time to either get past an obstacle or
avoid having an enemy return from the puzzle realm, the more fun the game is.
The game looks fine at least. More games need an elderly English protagonist
setting out on a globe-trotting adventure. There are plenty of bizarre
cartoonish characters to encounter throughout the story. Everything is played
for comedy, which works very well in a game that sends you through far-out
realms and involves a search for a magical set of clothing. It would be very
nice to see more of Henry Hatsworth, this was at least a unique game, and it
feels like they could do even more with the formula if they tried. Henry
Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure is still a very good platformer and worth
looking into.
