A Gaming Diary
Soosiz (iPhone)
I’ve got no idea where the title’s from. It may be the main character, or the world or something, but I didn’t pay an awful lot of attention to the opening text screens. Something to do with a happy place being taken over by an ancient evil, leaving me the only little round chap capable of saving the world. That sort of thing.
The story’s not especially important.
When it comes to the game, though, you’ve basically got a Super Mario Galaxy-inspired 2D platformer. Lots of little planetoids floating in space, all with their own gravity. Up becomes down, down becomes up. It’s all very confusing at first, but it becomes second nature surprisingly quickly, helped by a difficulty curve that appears to be close to perfection. I’m on the second world now and the game has been getting harder ever so gradually. You don’t really notice until you go back to one of the first levels and scoff at its simplicity.
It’s really very lovely. It looks great, with a Rolando/Loco Roco vibe and the controls are perfect, though getting used to the exact placement of the left and right buttons took five or ten minutes to get down. It doesn’t save your progress within a level if you quit out for any reason, but levels are short enough for that not to be an issue.
Overall, it’s a great game and one of the App Store highlights… but there’s a fly in the ointment.
The game commits one of the worst sins possible, something no game should ever do in the twenty-first century. Something that had me growling and almost giving up.
It has boss fights at the end of certain levels… without a checkpoint before the boss. So if the boss kills you, then you have to go back and do the whole level again. This was irritating the first time it happened, but later in the game when the difficulty of both the boss and the preceding level is higher, I think it might be fatal. I hope not, but I’m very worried.
Print article | This entry was posted by That Rev Chap on October 13, 2009 at 8:13 am, and is filed under iPhone. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |