Action Henk (Xbox One) Second Opinion Review

Firstly, this is a speedrunner platformer. It expects one to play through its levels more than once to perfect finishing times. As for Henk, he is actually a toy action hero, but after him being out of action for a while, he is brought back into the spotlight, and when his trophy gets stolen, he starts chasing after the enemy by completing various side scrolling obstacle courses.

It feels great to play this. The movement is very fluid yet heavy and it's very satisfying to beat the top scores. While playing single player, if connected to Xbox Live, it shows leaderboards with friends or public times. This can ramp up the challenge quite spectacularly, especially when there are tenths-of-a-second differences. In the campaign it is only necessary to beat the stages but collecting the gold medals, and proving how precisely the stage can be defeated is pretty cathartic.

There is local multiplayer(!), which was originally exclusive to the console versions of the game and subsequently added to the PC edition. It allows up to four people to play, and is generally well crafted. Each player is on the same screen and must compete to cross the finish line the fastest, and, in order to make it more competitive, the screen sharing is used as a weapon, if one can force the other off the left of the screen, then that one will have to wait to respawn at the next checkpoint.

There are a couple of glaring issues, though, mainly having to do with this 'checkpointing' system. If someone dies, for example, he/she is kept in limbo until the next checkpoint. This makes sense in most ways, but when players respawn, they have to get up to speed when the opponent already has the momentum, meaning they are most likely driven off the left side of the screen, dying once again. It's a small issue, but it can lead to frustration.

There is a great character variety available, with roughly 30 characters to pick in both single and multiplayer modes. These all play the same, but it's a welcome progression measure to help keep the single player interesting. They are all parodies of action figures, but made to look washed up, and as an aesthetic it works really well.

Unfortunately, one thing that Action Henk appears to have overlooked is an online competitive mode, similar to that of the local ones, since it would have been nice to be able to interact with friends who weren't in the same room. Although not important to the game's overall enjoyment, it would have surely been a nice little extra.