Currently Playing: June Mobile-5
Super Hexagon What, realistically speaking, is there to write about? It's a migraine in game form. The music is good, the concept is good, the voice-over woman is scary and the difficulty curve is brutal. It's an interesting case study in that it relies almost exclusively on negative emotions - the game is so obviously & deliberately designed to make you hate it, part of you rebels and instead desires to master it. Playing Super Hexagon is like trying to domesticate a rabid honey badger - it's almost certainly not worth the suffering involved.
Ava Airborne
This is a cute one. You play as Ava, an adorable, undauntable and apparently indestructible stunt-woman flying her hang-glider through danger-strewn skies. Though gameplay is familiar (hold to rise, release to fall) a charming on-boarding section, with lots of hand-holding and Ava twittering at you in her tiny voice, gets new players up to speed and sets the game's upbeat tone. You can also put your name in so she will address you directly, which is a neat feature. Pretty visuals and cheery music round out the experience.
GHOST POP
Oooh Playside. They make good games. Well, they made the Dumb Ways To Die games, and I think those are pretty cute. Ghost Pop is pretty cute too. You play as a Little Red Riding Hood-esque character (alternatives are available, trotting through the woods with your torch. Shine a light on the ghosties, and they will disappear. Let them get too close, and so will you. It's a sweet premise, but the soul is quickly sucked out of it by constant ad-nagging. A bit less earnestness in the monetisation would have gone a long way.
TETRUN
Ignore the ugly app icon, there is something a bit smart a different going on here. Tetrun is a mash-up of an endless runner, and Tetris. Blocks fall constantly onto a rotating platform, around which our masochistic human/hamster exercise enthusiast trundles ceaselessly, and must be fitted together quickly and efficiently to form a pathway. The game demands a lot from the player, navigating the character and arranging the level structure happen simultaneously, but it's an unexpectedly interesting gameplay idea.
THE TRAIL
First impressions are positive. I can pick from a variety of characters, and it looks quite pretty. The frame-rate stutters are pretty nasty but my bigger concern is that, despite high artistic merit, the game utterly fails to grab me in it's opening few minutes. The info sheet at the beginning, outlining my character's plan to make their fortune, bears no resemblance to the gameplay, where I roll along through on-rails gameplay, swiping to pick up inexplicably floating objects for fetch quests. I need more time with it, I think, to figure out what this game is all about but I'm not sure it knows either.
(ED. - This concludes 1 year of this column "Mobile-5.")
