What started out as an enjoyable and fullfilling game, quickly turned into a trudge fest of epic proportions. I cannot think of another game ever that has been so promising and then such a letdown due to the extreme difficulty it transforms into.
For those of you who don't know, Henry Hatsworth (the awesomely stereotypically English gentleman above) engages in a typical platformer on the top screen of the DS while a match three puzzle scrolls by on the bottom. As enemies are killed on the top screen, they take the place of a colored block in the puzzle and then you need to transfer to the bottom screen (which pauses the upper screen platforming) and match three with the enemy as one of the three to get rid of him. Failure to do so will bring them back up to the top screen as a wickedly devious and hard to kill flying block. Think birds on Castlevania with an attitude and then you get the idea.
The game starts off easy - waaaaaaay easy - and introduces you to the cast of characters whom are all lovable and fun, including your nemesis Weaselby. You learn basic attacks and how the systems work. Then, somewhere around level three it starts to hate you. 3-6 (the boss of world 3) seems to be the breaking point for a lot of people, but I made it through ok, but I finished wondering just how hard world 4 was going to be.
Really, really hard as it turns out.
I played through the 4th world, stumbling here and there and got pissed at the DS a few times, slinging it into a corner, upsetting a few cups on my desk in the process. But it was the 4th world boss that took the cake. I must have played him 20-30 times, just brutally going forward, trying to beat it through sheer dogged determination, which frankly, did nothing. Then I studied his patterns, milked the puzzle for upgrades and eeked out a win. I was stoked and at that point, I knew that world 5 was the last level in the game and I was determined to beat it.
I played 5-1 another 20 or so times and eventually started only playing one life at a time due to the sheer level of frustration involved. It was beyond brutal, but I needed to pass 5-1. I eventually did, stopping frequently in the puzzle world to fully charge up my hearts, add bonuses and change into the powered-up robot which happens after connecting a number of three's in the puzzle world.
Somehow, I beat 5-2 in one shot and felt that maybe I could actually finish this game. I had read on a few forums that 5-1 and 5-2 were the hardest levels in the final world and that the last two were just really, really long, but not as hard. I set at 5-3, determined to make it through. Around two days into playing the world, my resolve was broken. I was back to playing a life at a time and the frustration was exceptional. I began to hate this game and decided that in order to preserve my mental health, I would sell it or trade it, which I ended up doing on Goozex.
It wasn't that the game needed just a high level of skill to beat it. There were so many cheap areas where you could only move a little forward, take out an enemy, then forward again to take out another one and so on. It wasn't like Mega Man, where you have really tough platforming with tricky enemy placement. It was like taking some average platforming and scattering a ton of enemies with a myriad of different attacks on them and then somehow trying to stay on said platforms while enemies were shooting, jumping and pounding the ground all around you. Not going to happen. The levels are designed ok, but its the enemies and enemy placement that really kills it. Typically, you'll slug through a number of them and then wait to use puzzle bonuses to power back up, but this takes alot of time and there are very infrequent checkpoints, making it very, very tedious to beat a level.
I'm not sure what the hell EA was thinking when they shipped the game with that kind of ramp up in difficulty. It obviously is targeted to casual players with the puzzle elements, but there is no way a casual player could beat this. Unless they could 1 life Castlevania III without trying.
