High Seas Havoc (Genesis/Mega Drive)

High Seas Havoc is a game that goes by many names. The one we’ll be using here is its United States title, but in Japan it is known as Captain Lang and in Europe it goes by Capt’n Havoc, and if these disparate names weren’t clue enough, High Seas Havoc seems to be a game with a bit of an identity crisis. It’s a pirate game that features a level with high tech electronics, it’s trying to ape Sonic the Hedgehog’s speedy gameplay at times while also requiring pinpoint jump accuracy and precision at others, and it seems to devote more time to giving its hero animations that give him character rather than making him a good fit for his platforming game world.

While he’s called Lang in Japan, our hero in the English speaking world is the pirate seal Havoc. While living his life on the seven seas with his sidekick, a seal called Tide who is an actual baby, he comes across a girl named Bridget who holds the map to the all-powerful Emeralda that can grant whoever owns it immeasurable power. An evil pirate walrus named Bernardo covets this gem though and sends one of his men to capture Bridget, Tide, and the map, Havoc heading out to get them back and foil the walrus’s plans. Oddly enough, Bernardo is the first and last boss he’ll fight, Bernardo’s animal crew making up the rest of the battles between the two skirmishes. The focus of the game is definitely on Havoc though, the seal hero having plenty of different animations and sprites, perhaps too many to be honest. While he seems oddly angry quite often, the real troublesome animations are whenever Havoc takes damage. Already coming with the penalty of being launched backwards somewhat far by the impact, depending on the style of the attack, he can be further hampered with unnecessary delays. If he’s scorched, he’ll linger in the air while covered in ash, making traversing moving platforms more difficult than it needs to be. Other times, he might get pricked by something spiky, landing and looking at the holes in the seat of his pants so that the enemy who damaged him has more time to approach for a second hit. Animations like the ones that appear before levels or when a boss appears don’t hurt and do give more life to a game that does look and sound pretty good, detailed backgrounds and spritework coupling well with the adventurous music, but the damage reactions hamper a platformer that seems to be slipping back and forth between two mostly incongruous styles.

Happy to copy the 1991 hit Sonic the Hedgehog, High Seas Havoc has a few areas where high speed is encouraged, although it can feel like you don’t have much choice in how fast you go. Going from a walk to a run is so quick and instantaneous that going fast lacks any build up or thrill to it, it just simply being the way to go forward and one that locks at a pretty standard but speedy pace. The game is happy to dole out boot pick-ups that speed you up, but the influence they have is almost imperceptible and their usefulness is questionable when the game stops giving you the straightaways required to really spend much time running forward. Early levels do try to toy with it though, having hazards like mines that only hurt you if you’re moving too slowly to outrun the blast, rocks that chase you from behind, and enemies who will pop out of nowhere and pursue you at a pace just slightly slower than yours to incentivize the running. However, High Seas Havoc soon tries to punish you for taking the chance to run across what looks like areas designed for it, enemies waiting ahead you won’t have much time to react to, some even specifically delaying their attacks so if you do come to a halt to avoid smashing into them, they’ll still leap forward and hit you. While the game will never stop giving you speed up shoes, soon it becomes clear the game has given up on the speed-focused gameplay it started with, levels becoming more and more focused on threading needles and pinpoint jumps.

Most of High Seas Havoc is about a slow and careful approach to platforming. Walking forward may have a group of flying birds or windswept crates hurtle towards you, the only way to avoid them being finding the one spot you can slip through in their formation. Bosses will often have attacks that fill most of the screen, the player needing to react quickly enough to find the openings between hurled caltrops, floating rocks, and falling meteors to squeak through and hurt the boss. Stages can also have platforms that are only just barely wide enough for Havoc to stand on them, these sometimes positioned above deadly drops. While High Seas Havoc is kind enough to give you a life bar so you can take multiple hits, the enemies deal different degrees of damage making it hard to know how many hits you have left before death. Some of the difficulty in the precision platforming is mitigated though by way of the abundance of jewels and treasure chests found throughout the game. By collecting the floating gems or popping open a chest, you can gradually get enough booty to earn extra lives, and the treasure chests can contain other items like healing items or the dubiously useful boots. With checkpoints and continues as well, High Seas Havoc can be beaten, but not without a fight, the player needing to learn how to overcome the many demanding moments its difficult design features.

Besides his weird speed issues, Havoc also isn’t the best attacker. For the most part, you’ll definitely want to rely on the platform game standby of hopping onto an enemy to defeat them because Havoc’s other attacking option is a double-edged sword. After jumping, you can press the button again to do a quick leg strike, but this strike is almost too quick for its own good. Hitting an enemy at an odd elevation requires precise timing, and some enemies can only be defeated with this attack. Bosses in particular demand it, resisting jumps from above and even having parts of their body that deflect the jump strike just to make them unnecessarily harder. Jumping in towards a boss and kicking won’t bounce you back either, making it easy to leap towards a boss during their brief vulnerability window to hurt them and end up hurt yourself since you kept moving forward and touched them. Havoc also packs a fairly situational roll that can let him get under things, but it’s more an odd inclusion than something done poorly and it can find a few interesting uses like rolling under certain enemies or hazards that otherwise would be more difficult to get around.

The poor mishmash of two platforming styles and a bad jump attack could have made High Seas Havoc much worse if it wasn’t for the strength of some of its level concepts. There is a decent show of variety across the thirteen levels if you ignore the issues with abruptly swapping between play types. The pirate ship levels let you pick a path by going up and across the layers of the masts, and levels like the snowy Mount Chester can be towering mazes where finding the way forward is the main challenge, although these have a little quirk with a few blind jumps from moving platforms. The high tech area, despite being out of place with the pirate fantasy, has freezing water as both a hazard and a platforming tool, and while the ants you need to ride across the rails in Mt. Bernardo have some issues with blind jumps and quick deaths for messing things up even slightly, they do add to a game that has a proper level of platforming variety if the mechanics had settled into one style more clearly. Perhaps the most interesting stage is a burning hamlet where a giant sentient fireball is chasing you all the way through tight burning corridors, the pressure of the situation and need to act quick a good challenge that is only somewhat hurt by the fact the fireball can cheat and catch up instantly if it falls too far behind. It seems like every positive comes with a downside though, every interesting or effective inclusion hurting itself in some way, either through an odd inclusion or being a poor fit for the way Havoc controls.

THE VERDICT: High Seas Havoc is at odds with itself. It pushes you to go speedy at times but can hurt you for being too fast while also sometimes damaging you if you slow down. The precision moments of the game can provide interesting challenges but can ask for a lot of needle threading that kills the player at times for not anticipating sudden or abundant hazards. The jump attack is made invaluable for boss fights despite being flawed in design, but underneath the layers of missteps and punishing platforming is a game with some good ideas. The levels feel distinct from each other and ask players to approach them in different ways, and while the bosses are tough, their designs scrape against what could have been legitimate challenges. When it comes down to it, it seems like there is a decent game beneath it all, Havoc just isn’t the hero that could help it shine.

And so, I give High Seas Havoc for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

A BAD rating. Better movement and a better jump attack would go a long way in making Havoc a good fit for the world he’s been thrown into. Its dabbling in speedy gameplay doesn’t do it any favors and is mostly tossed aside, but it seems that brief flirtation kept it from better embracing controls fit for precision platforming and action. If less time was spent trying to give him expressive animations and more was devoted to making his movement and attacks more fluid and reliable, the tough level design could have been overcome, although there are definitely some moments where it expects incredibly tight movement on level layouts you have to learn through failure. Giving you extra lives aplenty does allow the player to get through it eventually, but having the screen filled with trouble that you don’t have much time to react to rarely works out unless you already know it’s coming. There is a good degree of creativity featured in the level designs, the shift from straightforward designs to multi-tiered levels to mazelike ones keeping gameplay objectives fresh, but the enemy and hazard placement seems like it’s trying too hard to be difficult rather than letting you just enjoy the stage for its more legitimate obstacles.

I won’t dismiss High Seas Havoc for following a trend, especially since much of it does break away from it or tries its own ideas, but by trying to ride the coattails of Sonic the Hedgehog ever so slightly, it ends up slipping when it pursues its original ideas. There are plenty of nifty level designs that could fit snugly into a better action platformer, but this pirate adventure’s mechanics just don’t blend well with the game world, leaving it a little lost at sea when it comes to what it wants to be.