So, Toy Story 4 is coming out soon. Even though I'm sure they said #3 would be the last. Disney/Pixar likes money though.

In the spirit of this, I looked through my Steam library for something to play. Action Henk has you play as an action figurine who has lost is trophy by a villain. You race a bunch of other toy figurines to get it back. I think. I guess one thing Toy Story 4 will have is an actual plot.

Action Henk is not quite an endless runner. There are 70 core levels, and a large amount more in the Steam Workshop, each with an end goal. In each you just need to reach the end.

There are Medals for how well you do. Bronze, Silver, and Gold. The more of these you get, the more levels you can unlock to progress through. I'm not good at twitchy runners at my current age of 37 however this one was not too bad, and I managed to unlock half the game in 60 minutes or so.

At any point you can restart the entire level, or restart from the last set of fireworks that launched as you passed. Checkpoints will fail you getting a high score, but useful when trying to learn a chunk of the level.

Once you have unlocked a level you can challenge the Rainbow difficulty. Which is playing Gold with various tricks you'll learn through playing on how to optimise your runs.

Of course you can instead choose a friend to challenge. In single-player you race their time ghost.

Alternatively, if you just want to have fun without the constant need to reset when you fail, challenge your own time, or none at all.

I can appreciate this. While the game is leaderboard focused, it eases off a lot of the pressure and rage people can get from these type of games.

Once the main runs are done against the clock, each group of levels has you challenge another character. There's no medals in this, just gotta beat them. Doind so unlocks them as a character to play as.

There's no stats/abilities that I could see in doing so. But you do get to play as someone other than the beer belly bastard that Hank is.

They all have creepy faces. It is disturbing. And not Uncanny Valley disturbing. It is the way they smile. TEETH! TEETH! TEETH!

Anyway, I guess it lets you customise a bit more in multiplayer. Or it would if there was anyone playing it. Servers are dead. You can start a custom one and hope someone will join in, but unless you organise it in advance, I doubt you'll find anyone.

Level design is bright and colourful, and background details 'mostly' stay out of the way. I say mostly as some levels took a slow playthrough first to not only see their layout, but recognise what is a platform, and what is foreground and background assets.

Not a huge issue, though did cause me to have a few "Oh!, COME ON!" moments!

Sound design is effective without being overwhelming. No constant taptaptap sounds from the runners, instead well mixed sliding and checkpoint firework sounds.

Music is one of those totally unremarkable soundtracks, yet effective to play with. Not repetitive enough to be annoying, yet good enough to race with.

There's just not a lot of variety. When I got to the disco stages I was happy at the set redesign. Right after that we're back in the bedroom again. Sure, the platforms and lighting are different. It's just a little lacklustre.

Back in the 90s, the era this game calls back to, I would of sat on the couch drinking my diluted blackcurrent syrup until I 100%'ed this thing. And I do feel that if I did not have as great a library of titles as I do now, I would of spent the time playing to do so.

Worth a look if you like the genre.

Game Acquisition: Humble Monthly (October 2016))
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 14 July 2019
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

OS: Windows Vista, 7, 8
Processor: Intel Core i5
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GT 430/equivalent or higher
Storage: 3 GB available space