Hurry Up Hedgehog! (DS) review "Hurry Up Hedgehog is instead a modest title based upon some German board game I’m not even going to try and spell. It presents players with a grid full of pits and challenges them to get three of their four hedgehogs to the other side before any of the other teams can. Along the way, you need to try and push your opposition’s hedgehogs out of the way (and, ideally, into pits) while trying to navigate the safest route through the obstacles and opposition."

After running an eye over a few of the already-published reviews for this game, I can’t help but think a lot of my reviewing brethren have completely missed the point of Hurry Up Hedgehog. Either that or they’re lazy, hopeless hacks.

So I’ll get all the stupid Sonic comparisons out of the way early, and it will be easy seeing as there are none to be made by a sane hand. Sonic is a faster-than-sound ball of speed; the hedgehogs found here are not. They’re just hedgehogs, and if you try and draw a comparison based on the two games out of the shared species both exhibit, then you’re an idiot.

Hurry Up Hedgehog is instead a modest title based upon some German board game I’m not even going to try and spell. It presents players with a grid full of pits and challenges them to get three of their four hedgehogs to the other side before any of the other teams can. Along the way, you need to try and push your opposition’s hedgehogs out of the way (and, ideally, into pits) while trying to navigate the safest route through the obstacles and opposition.

Each of your turns comprises of three stages. First an active lane is selected, either by choice or random selection depending on how you set the game up. Either way, one of the six lanes will become highlighted. Before you do anything with this, the second step is optional; you can shunt any of your hedgehog icons to the side, perhaps strafing them into a live lane or nudging an enemy player into a handy pit or inopportune lane. Once this is done (or ignored) you have to move a hedgehog in the active lane, whether it be one of yours or not. This can lead from anything to running an opponent into a handy pitfall or being forced to stroll their last piece into the end-zone for them to collect the win.

There are a solid number of options to tinker with that can completely change the way you play any game. You can have hedgehogs transfer from one edge of the board from the other or make the boarders impassable barriers. You can scroll the player count from anything from two-to-six, allowing any combo of human or CPU-controlled hedgehogs groups as you like. It’s not as variable as the back of the box blurb would like to make out (it boasts of 32 differing games, which is strictly true with the altering of the options available to you, but not always with as big a change between types to worth mention) but the right changes can gift you a completely new way to nudge your spiky mammals onwards towards victory.

It’s never going to be a hardware-shifting game and it’s never going to have the allure as the game less efficient reviewers insist on comparing it to, but Hurry Up Hedgehog is, if you like, a budget Tetris. If you have a few minutes to kill, then you’ll find yourself scrolling through a few sessions and feeling pretty good about yourself when you win a game. It will never be the most important title in your collection, but, give yourself time to learn how to properly play the game, and it will be one you come back to often.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (May 06, 2008) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.