Review:
Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure – A combination too far?

 My DS gets very little love. In fact it is often left behind, nursing the few games I have bought for it while my 360 collection fills yet another shelf. But every now and then, a game comes along that simply begs to be played, and Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure is one such game. Others include the Professor Layton series and Mario Kart, but this isn't a review about those, so I'll stop.

I could boil this down to two separate games. One is a simple A to B platformer with a little 'find the chest's full of loot' exploration in between. The other is a simple match three or more of the same colour blocks to make them disappear type affair. But it's the way in which they are combined that makes this so much more then the sum of its parts.

Dispatching an enemy on the top screen, containing the platform section of the game, sends the enemy to the bottom screen, containing the puzzle part. The enemy appears as a coloured block with a face on. If these aren't matched with two or more similar blocks by the time they reach the top, they reappear on the top screen. Make sense? It is a little difficult to explain, however it work's beautifully in practise.

The story involves the old but still active adventurer Henry Hatsworth. You start a rather short platforming section where some basic signs indicate jumping, swinging a machete and firing a musket. At the end you find a golden hat that starts your adventure to find the rest of the golden ensemble.

Each piece of the suit grants different abilities. The hat allows you access to the puzzle game on the lower screen, the trousers allow you to wall jump, the pipe allows you to breathe underwater and so on. To hinder your process, your arch-nemesis Leopold Charles Anthony Weasleby the Third is out to collect the suit for himself.

And that, is about all there is to know about the game play. Granted, it plays a lot better then it sounds, but this being an objective review, I should probably mention the downsides.

The game likes to dump you into situations where you are locked in a small area where enemies crawl in from either side of the screen, and often down the walls firing horizontally. Between dodging and mowing down enemies, you are also having to stop every minute or so to clear blocks from the lower screen to prevent more enemies turning up. It all some times feels a little too much.