As a longtime dweller of Earth’s polar regions (north and south), I have a fondness for penguin games that go beyond the usual “aww, aren’t they cute” sentimentality. So for me to spurn one quickly, it has to be really lousy.
Meet Rocket Downhill Penguin, a 99-cent scrolling obstacle game that I tired of with…well, rocket speed.
Players tilt their iPhones right and left to guide the penguin down a never-ending slope, dodging and picking up items that scroll downward from an overhead perspective. Sliding uses energy, shown in a bar at the bottom of the screen, so it’s necessary to pick up cups of cocoa that also provide 50 points and a short-term score multiplier.
Energy depleting damage occurs by colliding with snowmen (a little) and trees (a lot), but they also offer an opportunity for score jockeys. Snowmen jettison hats which can be caught for 100 points and trees dislodge quick-vanishing birds that can be tapped for 1,000.
A final object, appearing much less frequently, are stars that provide 500 points and a health boost. Collecting three results in a temporary bubble of invincibility.
Learning the basics takes about 20 seconds and realizing there’s nothing else takes a couple minutes more. The tilt controls are less precise than they ought to be, making the large hazards and small rewards more challenging in a way that doesn’t feel related to ability. The background musicbox loop gets irritating fast and, while the game does speed up every 3,000 points, the terrain doesn’t change and there isn’t much feeling of accomplishment unless competing for high scores via Facebook means something.
Developer Tony Huynh did a few things right to avoid a bottom score, including reasonably cute graphics and an absence of notable bugs. Also, he gets credit for not including polar bears – a way-too-frequent occurrence in ice-theme games that raises irrational hackles since people don’t seem to realize they live at opposite ends of the Earth. But that doesn’t change the fact this is a lame release in a game genre so old beginning programers have been writing better versions in BASIC since the dawn of the computer age.
Score: 2 out of 10
Mark Sabbatini
Rocket Downhill Penguin by UnlikelyDuo (Developer’s– website)
$0.99
Platform Reviewed: iPhone/iPod (Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later)
Genre: Arcade
Languages Supported: English
Rating: 4+
File Size: 4.6 MB
