QuickAdvice: Rabid Gophers & Fly Away Rabbit
Rabid Gophers ($1.99) by QuantumSquid Interactive is based on the whack a mole mechanic, but much more graphic. It's a tap to shoot game where gophers pop up, and you tap on them to shoot them. The game has three different gameplay mechanics that are split into campaign and survival mode.
The campaign mode presents a neat little story of why the gophers are attacking your house. The first mechanic is simple tap to fire shooting gophers with a shotgun as they pop out of nine holes. Next is like Simon where you see the order of colors, and then tap in appropriate sequence. This mode is to wire dynamite, and blast away the gophers. Finally you need to drag the aiming cursor on to the gophers, and tap to fire. This has a bigger field of holes, and you're using a sniper scope.
The campaign mode gives you three waves of each mechanic to deal with. Then it's on to survival mode where you try to last as long as you can in one of the three mechanics. Your survival time is submitted to OpenFeint online high scores, and there are online achievements as well.
The game is fun, and quick in whatever mode you're in. You'll definitely want to complete the campaign once you start it, and the variability is nice. The game is so much more than whack a mole, and good because of it. The survival modes let you excel in one of the mechanics, and deal with a quickly increasing difficulty curve.
The graphics are great from the design of the gophers to the explosion of blood when you shoot them. The sound effects of blasting the gophers makes you cringe, and thats all the sound there is.
Completing the campaign mode doesn't take the longest, but it makes it well worth your $2. Then there's solid survival with OpenFeint high scores and achievements in this well made package.
Rabid Gophers is worth $1.99, and is one of the better tap to shoot games in the App Store.
Fly Away Rabbit ($0.99) by Jonathan Parsons lets you help a little rabbit soar to the clouds. It's a physics based puzzle game where you remove varying types of blocks to let the rabbit holding a balloon rest in the clouds. As you remove blocks the balloon bounces around if the stack is unsteady. You beat a level if the rabbit comes to rest on the cloud at the top, or lose if the rabbit flies off screen.
The game has 48 levels split into three difficulties, and each level is scored based on how close to the middle of the cloud the rabbit ends up at. There are different types of blocks with some that are extra bouncy, some that pop the balloon, and some that you can't remove until all the rest are gone. As you progress there are more difficult blocks to deal with, and it will take multiple retries to get the rabbit safely to the cloud.
The game is solid, but has nothing special, remarkable, or memorable. It doesn’t really have any fun through the levels, and it seems more of a chore than anything else as you move along. The game is like any other of the same genre which the App Store has tons of.
The game has simplistic graphics, though there is a nice soundtrack to fit the thinking theme. As you’re playing you’ll lose interest as the levels meld together, and this is one where you won’t want to get through the entire thing. There are better ways to spend $1 in the App Store, as Fly Away Rabbit is more boring than challenging.
