"Benjamin Blümchen" is one of those german kids TV characters hardly anyone outside of the german speaking countries knows. As you might have noticed by my broken english, my lack of sense of humor or even my username, I am one of these so called germans. Despite this I have only watched Benjamin Blümchen like once or twice in my life during my childhood and therefore do not feel nostalgic for it.
I found out about the existence of this game around two days ago when I wanted to log another german game and was weirdly intrigued for some reason, so I bought a complete in box copy of it.
This was not one of my best decisions. I think I should start talking about the game now.
The game is comprised of 6 levels wildly varying in quality.
The first level is a 2d platformer. It isn't the only 2d platforming level and these are the best in my opinion. The controls aren't the worst, but they have made it so you can only jump with the B button while the A button does nothing. I don't really get why but it works I guess. Benjamins jumps are really slow which can mess up your timing, but it is definitely not at all bad for a 2d platformer on the Game Boy.
The sprite work is also not bad at all and the soundtrack is actually better than expected.
The first level itself plays out in two sections, the first one being inside a house with a lot of health pickups and just a few enemies. The only reason why I mentioned that last part was because of the second section. It plays out in an ice cavern with ice physics almost no health pickups and not only more enemies, but also random ice spikes hanging from the ceiling which are really hard to avoid or even differentiate from those who don't deal damage.
another thing is the inclusion of platforms which you have to time jumping on because if you don't you will be send way back to the beginning of the level.
The second level is underwater which might sound bad at first but isn't actually that much worse. There isn't a lot to talk about other than some plant life being hard to differentiate from other plant life that damages you and that this level is a bit too long for my liking.
But the third level was one of the worst things I have ever experienced. It is an isometric platformer which in itself is not that fun for someone like me who doesn't really enjoy isometric platformers that much, but it gets even worse than that. This levels controls are absolutely atrocious. You can both move and jump in 8 directions, but the jump itself needs some time to charge up. There are three types of jumps.
If you only charge it up for a short or even no time you will get a short jump, which wont't be useful in any situation because you couldn't even jump too far with the second type of jump. The normal jump is the type of jump you will probably want to use the most out of the three. It basically outclasses the short jump in any category. The third and last type of jump is the long jump. This is incredibly niche and is only used around five times, but can be used for short cuts.
Now on to the problems I have with the third level.
1: The depth perception is really bad. This is in part because of this being a Game Boy Color game, but is in part a problem with the sometimes janky hitboxes of the lily pads. which also bring their own problems like.
2: Due to the hitboxes not at all matching with the actual sprite of the lily pads you sometimes don't make jumps you used the right jumps for. This will make it so that you will obviously use the long jump next time because the normal jump "obviously is the wrong one". But surprise you actually used the right jump but now you are at the beginning of the level again, which bring me to the last problem I will talk about. (there are way more)
3: This level is way too long. It took me around 30 minutes to beat, which might not sound that bad, but that is around half the game and means that you have to put up with the worst ever created for half an hour.
This is definitely the worst level in the game.
The fourth level isn't that great either. I can't really describe it but if I had too, it feels like if you played Mario Kart, but only with the map and only a small part of the map and if you run into a wall which you couldn't react to because of the small screen size you will loose one of your three lives but the invincibility lasts such a small amount of time that you might loose all your lives. This is exasperated by Benjamin Blümchen being a fat elephant and that you are being chased by a mouse because "haha funny big elephant running from small mouse" and you therefore not being able to stop running. You also can't change direction directly and will have to input another direction for around half a second if you actually want to change it. I should maybe also point out that you can use a boost with the help of the A button, incredible.
The only saving grace of this level is that it' incredibly short.
But the developers at KIDDINX thought the control scheme of the fourth level was so incredible that they reused it for the fifth level "the race".
The differences of the fourth and fifth level are very minor. 1: You are now not longer able to take damage, already making this the better level of the two.
And 2: you have to chose between 3 characters: the kangaroo, emu and the trollface Zebra. You can guess which one I used for my first playthrough. The characters themselves have minor differences like the emu being the fastest but not being the easiest to control. But as far as I know you don't need to win any of the three races to play the next level and this is therefore the easiest level by technicality.
The sixth level is another 2d platformer which as I already pointed out at the beginning of this review is the best play-style of the game. This time it's a bit worse as there are ladders you have to climb on, but actually climbing them is really finicky. The sixth level is still way better than the last few. After this the game just end abruptly and boots you back to the title screen.
Well all in all it isn't the best game I have ever played; I think I made that really obvious, but there is still fun to be had here. As already mentioned the ost is surprisingly not bad and I have blown some of the problems of the non-level-3-levels out of proportion to be fair and for something that could be categorized as german early 2000s TV show tie for the Game Boy Color this was a surprisingly fun short game.

ps. This games title, at the moment of me writing this, does not include the Umlaute (äöü) and sounds incredibly funny for german speakers.