The Shrekoning: Shrek: Hassle at the Castle (GBA)

You might be wondering why The Game Hoard is suddenly taking a look at a bunch of Shrek games for a review series, and the answer ties back not to Shrek: Hassle at the Castle, but its sequel Shrek: Reekin’ Havoc. Reviewed back when The Game Hoard was young on a whim, I was still figuring out how I wanted to do categories for reviews and since Shrek had quite a few games I decided to add a Shrek tag to the review. For years though nothing was added to it, even though I had bought Shrek: Hassle at the Castle with the intent of someday covering it. However, a friend and reader going by the name Gooper Blooper came up with a plan to give that Shrek tag more than a little bit of love, bombarding me with a slew of Shrek games to give me plenty of material to cover in a Shrek-themed review series. While there are plenty of titles to go through, it felt fitting to slip in the only Shrek game I owned before the surge of gifts, and Shrek: Hassle at the Castle certainly deserved some coverage because it is the only game that attempts to adapt the actual events of the first film.

Shrek: Hassle at the Castle starts you off with Shrek still the irritable loner he was at the start of the movie, the ogre eventually meeting friends like Donkey, confronting Lord Farquaad over the fairy tale characters dumped on his land, and arranging a deal where Shrek will be left alone if he can save Princess Fiona. Gradually the adventure causes his rough exterior to thaw as his interactions with Donkey and the Princess draw out his softer side. You will be presented most of the plot’s events by way of screenshots from the film with white text giving you broad explanations of how events are unfolding, but you will play through many of the expected moments like Shrek heading to the dragon guarded castle Fiona is locked away in, Shrek and Donkey arriving at the castle city of Duloc to meet with Farquaad, and a few moments in between like when the main characters run into Dreamworks’s silly twist on Robin Hood. It certainly steers close to the film events for the most part, and when it does break away it seems less interested in unusual twists to fairy tale tropes and instead includes them without alteration, the player helping out characters like Hansel and Gretel who are still cherubic children put in danger by an evil witch.

The sidescrolling platformer action in Shrek: Hassle at the Castle does present itself with an interesting art style, character given large heads and small bodies that make it easy to see their expressions without making their sprites too big. The game definitely puts this to good use, the three playable characters of Shrek, Fiona, and Donkey all have many expressions to match when they’re attacking, hurt, victorious, or even doing something simple like picking up an item. The game can even manage to include a few little wordless scenes during play this way, primarily during the final encounter with Farquaad where his reactions to developments in the fight are only shown through his facial expressions. The backgrounds don’t skimp on details, the character animations can sometimes be surprisingly fluid like Fiona’s hair flip, and the game manages some impressive work even with larger character sprites like Dragon who dominates the right side of the screen as you are outrunning her. While the exaggerated bobblehead character designs might not be to everyone’s taste, the game does a great job graphically on the Game Boy Advance.

The gameplay can’t be commended quite as much. Most levels in Shrek: Hassle at the Castle do focus either on ideas like making it to the end of a platforming stage or fighting back a boss, and while there are different impediments and limitations placed upon this to shift around the design, the core action is definitely where greater focus could have given the game more depth. For the most part your only actions of note are jumping, attacking, and a “roar” attack all character have access to that will clear away enemies on screen after you’ve beaten enough in a row. The roar is a fine addition and a welcome one since otherwise the battles are very basic and your options for handling them limited. All three characters don’t attack too far ahead of their bodies, Donkey in particular seeming to have short range strikes, and attacks do involve a brief moment of commitment before you can attack again. The game sets up many moments where a few foes pile in and either all come running towards you or have some back up from a flying foe or someone with a projectile attack. It’s not too hard to find yourself in a pickle where punching a foe will kill them but leave you open to other damage, and jumping over them is often not an option because the enemies have packed in so tightly. The battles themselves aren’t made much more difficult by this, often just an annoying enemy or group perched in an unsafe place to navigate, but they are good for whittling you down so the moments you can just roar a bunch of them away are a nice relief.

There are a few boss battles and special enemies in Shrek: Hassle at the Castle, and these usually turn out better since these enemies are bound to patterns and whip out more unique attacks to engage with. A witch fight has her teleporting around and you need to strike her before she can execute a suitably difficult to dodge apple rainfall or she might make duplicates and identifying the real one before she teleports away is the challenge, the gradual adjusting of your tactics a good approach to designing a battle within such a simple fighting system. Some tougher knights you come across involve you baiting out their strikes so they leave themselves vulnerable, but they also have the ability to call in regular enemies as back up who don’t play into pattern recognition and can again lead to those bothersome tight spots where no choice of attack seems the best through no fault of your own. The tougher foes can’t redeem the simple fighting system because they resort to whipping out regular baddies to whittle you down so often, but its clear some enemies are meant more as obstacles to the platforming rather than substantive fights.

The platforming isn’t quite there though. The playable trio can be oddly slippery when running, and since many levels add a time limit that does encourage constant running due to the tight timer, you will find yourself slipping into instant death drops, especially when the game wants a few rather precise jumps in a row. While there is a life system, you can continue from the start of a stage after a Game Over, but in some levels this definitely doesn’t dull the navigation woes. Infiltrating the Dragon’s castle definitely stands out as one of the sloppier moments. Climbing a staircase at one part is complicated by falling pieces you need to hop off of quickly, but the real annoying part is when you’re meant to jump across hanging chains. To climb vines or chains you don’t press up and you can’t swing from them, instead you hop up the stationary hanging objects that sometimes have very stringent ranges for detecting if you grabbed them from the bottom. Hopping slowly up the length of them in time sensitive situations is already a bother, but leaping from one to another often requires the slow journey to the very top so you can hopefully jump over and grab it instead of missing and falling to instant death. You often need to sort of slide off of these before the jump too, but if you slide too far you plummet and the jump alone won’t go far enough. What makes Dragon’s castle particularly bad for this is not only doing this going in, but the level then reverses and you go back through everything while being chased, the Dragon even launching fireballs at you that can instantly knock you off the chain, all with no checkpoints beyond the level split between entering and escaping.

Not every moment in Shrek: Hassle at the Castle is spent with slippery movement and bad vine controls though. You can pick up items like rocks and wooden boards to batter enemies with, some levels ask you to protect a character from incoming enemies that the game usually does a better job of spacing out then ones who hassle you during normal stage navigation, and you even get little diversions like a level where you play as Fiona trying to out-sing a bird. Sure you have moments like a timed level that involves waiting on slowly moving swamp logs to get to you and then hoping the jump that can only barely make it doesn’t fall short, but a lot of the game does involve harmless and simple platforming or enemy encounters where you just punch them without a thought and move forward. The variation that isn’t harmful though is mediocre and the moments where things do start to rub up against the control issues end up standing out more for it, so sadly Shrek: Hassle at the Castle swings from failing to stand out to making you remember it for the wrong reasons.

THE VERDICT: While not an overall difficult experience, Shrek: Hassle at the Castle’s less than smooth controls and bothersome enemy placement whittles both the character and player down over time. Plenty of acceptable but unremarkable moments of play are peppered throughout and a few boss fights even have decent ideas behind them, but then you get segments with tight timers or an abundance of enemies and it feels like the game is shoving you towards annoying mistakes. It does an impressive job bringing life to the cast of characters and environments from the film with an expressive visual style that blends cartoonishness and detail, but the basic gameplay doesn’t excite for most of the adventure and only stands out when it lends itself to slip ups.

And so, I give Shrek: Hassle at the Castle for Game Boy Advance…

A BAD rating. The rough parts of Shrek: Hassle at the Castle only really stand out when the game doesn’t design around its limitations. The odd way you climb vines and chains leads to unnecessary issues with lethal punishments, and the slipperiness of running doesn’t bode well for levels where timers or objectives require you to always be sprinting. Your regular attack can often leave you wide open when enemies are grouped up too tightly, and the game squanders some of the boss design potential by having many of them call in back up rather than utilizing more unique techniques. An attempt at stage goal variety does show potential at least and a fair bit of the experience can be walked through without much to worry about, but that ends up with your playthrough defined by the few moments that did stand out, those being the ones where things aren’t quite working out like they seem they should.

I seem to recall Shrek: Hassle at the Castle as being billed by someone as superior to its sequel, but Shrek: Reekin’ Havoc seemed to have more going on conceptually even if the execution of those ideas still lead to issues. Shrek: Hassle at the Castle is perhaps better defined by a prevailing feeling of mediocrity interrupted by irritating moments where it starts shoving the player around a little too much without giving them the best tools to respond to the platforming and enemy swarms. I’d probably have to revisit the sequel to determine which one is better but I’m in no rush to play such unexceptional games again, so the main takeaway seems to be, despite the memorable art direction, neither of these two GBA titles offers much and come up short in different ways. At least attempts were being made to differentiate them rather than continuing on with bad ideas, but despite playing a big role in leading to this Shrekoning, Shrek: Hassle at the Castle and its sequel are probably among the least interesting Shrek games for their mundane failures and minimal successes.