Review: Dizzy Bee
Dizzy Bee v1.4 | Published by Igloo Games | Via App Store | $2.99 | Released: 7-07-08
Overview
With a simplistic core game mechanic, Dizzy Bee doesn’t look like much on the surface. The goal? Liberate your fruit friends from mean-looking bad guys. To do this, players must rotate the iPhone. Many components of the level - Dizzy Bee himself, the enemies, and freed fruits - will fall towards whatever direction is currently “down”. As the game progresses through a surprisingly large number of levels, the puzzles get tougher, new obstacles and baddies are introduced, and things get much more satisfying.
Features
- Tilt-Based Gameplay
- Adorable
- Lots of Levels
- Three Separate Saves
Breakdown
The Good:First off, I had plenty of fun with Dizzy Bee. What started out as mild amusement quickly turned into enjoyable puzzlement and concentration. I ended up taking a minute before each level to observe the design and see what had to be done. When I lost a fruit, I would often frustratedly restart the level - nothing less than perfection was acceptable. Getting a little obsessed with an iPhone game is a new thing for me, and it’s a good thing.
Aside from enjoying the basic gameplay, there were plenty of little things I enjoyed about this game. For instance, in the menus and score screens, the buttons and bits of information all rotate to be facing up, no matter what way you hold your phone. This was just cool, even though it’s a logical feature to include since after completing a level, players could be holding their phone at any of 360 rotations. Other small pluses included the artwork, the sound effects, and the generally friendly vibe of Dizzy Bee.
Though it’s hard to stop talking about the fun and cute aspects of the game, Dizzy Bee actually deserves some respect. While the earlier levels are necessarily simple and unpunishing, later on the level design can be genuinely clever. The use of mechanics like teleporters, lock and key combos, and windmills add variety and challenge to the levels, and I found myself truly impressed.
You get medals for each level you complete, and the compulsion to collect all gold or perfect medals was moderate to huge for me. Dizzy Bee reminds me of the type of game that Nintendo describes when talking about their quest to bridge “casual” and “core” gamers. It invites you in and lets you learn the mechanics, and then ramps up the challenge - casual players are playing a legitimately tough game and they don’t even know it. In fact, while playing Dizzy Bee, I got nostalgic for the days of Super Mario 64 and more recently, Super Mario Galaxy. The little levels with lots to do to master them recalled the structure of those games, as did the general feel.
The Bad: Though Dizzy Bee won me over easily, there were a couple of complaints I had. First off, the core gameplay mechanic I described earlier as fairly simplistic has another face. The turning-my-phone-to-change-gravity controls felt woefully imprecise at times. I longed for the ability to keep my phone flat and slowly roll wherever I needed to go - the ability to be careful. However, whenever I tried to do this, a dialog popped up that told me holding the screen too flat makes the fruit sick. Hmm. Gripes aside, I do understand the point of making the accelerometer controls 2D-only. It forces players to work with the level design as intended and that makes sense, so this is fine. The other complaint I had was that instructions on how exactly the game worked were pretty spare. There were little dialogs that popped up hinting at a goal or the nature of a bad guy, but I’m the type that prefers to know what’s going on most of the time. A little instruction screen in the the beginning might have cleared up some of the confusion. I learned by doing, and I’m assuming most players would as well, so no huge foul here.