A Worthwhile Tie-In That Survives Some Stormy Seas
If you have Netflix and children, you may have encountered the two Chickenhare movies.
French/Belgian collaborations, they’re based on the graphic novels by Chris Grine and are slightly above the Netflix average. They’re also vastly more popular in their native countries, which might explain why we’re seeing a video game tie-in on our shores when most of us haven’t heard of him.
It’s refreshing to play a licensed game that isn’t based on a pre-existing story. In Chickenhare and the Treasure of Spiking-Beard, they’re trying to stop the pirate-hedgehog Spiking-Beard before he gathers seven crystals to make the all-powerful Rainbow Feather. We use ‘original’ loosely, as the Feather and its crystals look like an avian version of the Infinity Gauntlet. But Chickenhare fans will appreciate that this completes a kind of de facto trilogy with the Netflix movies.
An Unbalanced Trio
You can see why Chickenhare was an attractive video game prospect. The three main characters have distinct abilities that are made for gaming. Chickenhare, with his feathered ears, is the Princess Peach. He can glide from platform to platform, using air currents to keep himself afloat. Abe, the tortoise, has the natural capabilities of a tortoise. He can Koopa Troopa his way down slopes, smashing walls, and generally retreating to his shell to avoid damage. Meg, the skunk, is the fighter (so doesn’t really have a Mario equivalent). She kicks ass and can move slightly faster than the other two.
It’s a cracking setup for a character-switching adventure. Unfortunately, it would also have been a cracking setup for a co-op adventure, but N-Zone’s budget clearly didn’t quite stretch that far. It’s an elephant in the room for Chickenhare and the Treasure of Spiking-Beard: it always feels like a game that could and should have been co-op, not least because it’s a family game.
Levels are composites that need character-switches to get through. There will be long platform sequences with fans blasting air upwards and portals thrusting you forward. These are the Chickenhare bits, requiring careful mastery of jumps, floats and grappling hooks (which every character owns). They might end with a combat sequence, enemies like pigs, pirates and owl-hedgehogs (don’t ask) pumping out of side-doors. This is Meg’s specialty. And, on occasion, Abe will be required for on-rails sliding sections and the odd ground-stomp.
Why Did The Chickenhare Float Across The Road?
Two out of the three characters, at least, are enjoyable to play. Chickenhare was my default. A glide is a great safety net for when I inevitably stacked it and fell off a platform. I’d LT to Meg whenever blocks and enemies appeared, as she’s about twenty times better at dealing with them than anyone else. Abe, though: I’d try not to use him if I could help it.
It’s probably Chickenhare and the Treasure of Spiking-Beard’s most glaring flaw. It’s a character-switcher that can’t decide how it wants the character-switching to work. Sometimes, it feels like it wants you to pick the character that you like best, as 90% of the puzzles can be done by anyone. But Abe is slow and unenjoyable, and Chickenhare is clearly the most adaptable of all characters, so the choice is largely made for you. Other times, the designers want you to pick specific characters for specific puzzles, like a modern-day Lost Vikings, but Chickenhare is the solution for the vast majority of them. Abe, again, gets the short straw.
It leaves Chickenhare and the Treasure of Spiking-Beard being The Chickenhare Show. He is the main character, and likely the most-loved by fans, so there’s some sense to it. But it leaves the experience oddly weighted. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s undeniably odd.
Chickenhare Is A Level Above
The reason it’s not a dealbreaker is that the quality of the levels is surprisingly high. If there was a restrained budget then Chickenhare and the Treasure of Spiking-Beard doesn’t show it. There are six-and-a-bit worlds here, each with three levels and a boss, and barely a single idea is repeated. The worlds all look different, they contain wildly different enemies, and the ‘feel’ is distinct. A bamboo forest, filled with Minecraft-looking pigs, is a precarious climb upwards when every other level is a journey forwards. A mine has you careening around in minecarts and its levels are more claustrophobic. Energy and passion has gone into making these levels feel like a world-spanning adventure.
They are all so intricate, too. These aren’t bare-bones or identikit: it is genuinely impossible to tell what is coming around the next corner, and that next corner will have any combination of balancing, fighting, floating, backtracking, locks, keys or open-sections. At least in level-design terms, this is better than the licensed-game average by a significant margin.
That intricacy does mean that younger players will have trouble. We had to help our 10-year old through, and she’s on Roblox obbies most mornings. In the latter lava levels and definitely the bosses we struggled ourselves. The difficulty isn’t Meat Boy or even Rayman Legends high, but it’s close. And that’s more than you’d expect from a licensed game.
A Boss Or Two Too Many
We should chat about the bosses, as they’re the reason why the score tips down to a high 3.5 rather than a low 4. At least two of the bosses are borderline broken. The 2.5D platforming that Chickenhare and the Treasure of Spiking-Beard occasionally adopts just doesn’t want to play. You can be jabbing left or right and barely move, which is somewhat scuppering when you’re playing against the two hardest bosses in the game. They’re also unforgiving, occasionally random and ungenerously checkpointed.
These are problems that appear elsewhere in Chickenhare and the Treasure of Spiking-Beard, alongside a forced camera that sometimes struggles to find room for itself. But while they can be overcome in the normal levels, they become itchy nuisances in those boss levels.
Floating On
Generally, though, I was pleasantly surprised by Chickenhare and the Treasure of Spiking-Beard. It’s far from throwaway, as it offers a meaty number of levels that all attempt to delight the player in different ways. They’re so good, in fact, that they overcome a salvo of issues. A lack of co-op, poor character-switching, a wandering camera and some nightmare bosses all would have sunk a weaker vessel, but Chickenhare and the Treasure of Spiking-Beard floats on.
Important Links
Part Chicken, Part Hare, All Hero! Chickenhare is a New Family-Friendly Adventure! – https://www.thexboxhub.com/part-chicken-part-hare-all-hero-chickenhare-is-a-new-family-friendly-adventure/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/chickenhare-and-the-treasure-of-spiking-beard/9n1j8w73s1qz
