Action Henk (Xbox One) Review

The concept behind Action Henk is simple: players are dropped onto a track and using a combination of sprinting, jumping, sliding, and hooking, the aim is to reach the end of the level and, depending on how fast this is done, a bronze, silver, or gold medal will be received. That's it - the game in a nutshell. Simple to understand but a complete pain in the backside to master, especially when challenging the masters of each stage where the requirement is to perfect everything previously learned.

Speaking of stages, this is one area where Action Henk is absolutely great. These bright and colourful tracks revolve around things that would be found in a young child's bedroom, such as the first stage that looks like a mini racetrack that kids launch toy cars around. However, the backgrounds can be quite busy and this does make seeing what's coming up ahead quite difficult, causing a necessity to replay tracks repeatedly to learn them.

If you do plan on mastering each level, it will take multiple attempts as the gold medals can be brutally tough to achieve. Even the slightest set back will cause that elusive medal to remain...elusive. Once enough medals are collected from each stage, a new section is unlocked. Unfortunately, there are only nine sets of tracks in total (six tracks, plus one bonus in each), and each track only takes 30-50 seconds to finish, so it won't take long to beat.

Trying to perfect the tracks can be tough but, thankfully, depending on what time is selected at the start of each track, a ghost will show exactly what to do, similar to what has been seen in games such as Trials HD. An absolutely fantastic addition, as sometimes you can't help but think "How is this even possible?!", especially against the player challenges at the end of each section of maps.

Once having blasted through the campaign and been reasonably satisfied with the medal collection accrued, as well as the ranking across the world on the leaderboards, there is also a multiplayer mode that helps the game's replayability somewhat. It's nothing to shout from the rooftops about, especially as it doesn't always exactly want to work all of the time…