The Evil Old Fairy Wants You To Collect Muffins
Muffin Knight ($0.99) by Angry Mob Games is a throwback to classic side-scrolling action platformers like the original Mario Bros, with retro-style graphics and original gameplay.
The premise is that a little boy has suffered from a terrible curse, and it’s your job to help him. Every time he touches a muffin, he turns into a different creature, but when all the muffins are collected, the evil fairy who enchanted him will turn him back into a boy.
So, of course, the goal of the game is to collect all of the muffins. Movement is controlled with the arrow keys on the left side of the screen, while shooting and jumping are done by tapping the buttons on the right side.
Levels are arena style, meaning they’re tiny and enclosed. Muffins will spawn in random areas, and they must be collected. Each muffin turns the boy into something different, from a knight to an archer to a wizard, each with a different shooting ability. Jumping and shooting are key elements in the game, because there are enemies who are intent on keeping you from getting the baked goods.
Enemies will rush towards you and you must shoot them or jump over them. Avoiding enemies gets increasingly more difficult as you collect more muffins, because successive muffins spawn more enemies. During some levels, enemies spawn in a constant stream, making it tough to avoid them and progress.
Collecting a certain number of muffins will unlock new characters and areas to play in. My favorite character was the unicorn, who pooped out rainbow bombs that blew up enemies from afar. Dying will happen often, which causes you to restart the level, but doesn’t affect your muffin count.
However, to progress to a new level, you will need to collect a certain number of muffins in a row, which is not an easy task to accomplish when trying to avoid hordes of belligerent pigs. If you get bored with normal mode, you can also use multiplayer mode to play with friends who also have the app.
As you collect muffins, you’ll level up and earn skill points which can be assigned to any of the characters the boy transforms into, to give them new abilities and increased powers.
Muffin Knight is quite a bit of fun, thanks to constantly changing characters that all have different abilities. It’s certainly challenging, perhaps slightly too challenging, which could be remedied with fewer or slower monsters.
The controls could use some improvement in regards to sensitivity. Several times when I tapped jump, my character either didn’t jump, or didn’t jump in time.
Despite these minor flaws, I think Muffin Knight is an excellent game that’s certainly worth the $0.99.
