QuickAdvice: Bounce Your Way Around the City with Dropple
Dropple ($0.99) by Foundation Mobile Games, LLC is an accelerometer based platformer game in which you must collect all the coins in a level before proceeding onward.
You are Dropple, a white ball, who has decided that he wants to escape the boring old regime of a desk job and go around the city collecting coins to make his living.
There are 50 levels that will truly test your sanity as you attempt to collect all the coins in a level. The game starts out easy, but continually adds more challenges that will make it more difficult to collect all the coins and add to Dropple's retirement riches.
Dropple can bounce off walls and tiles, but there are special tiles that will go lower after each bounce, break once you bounce off them, make you jump higher, and plenty of others. I only made it through six levels before I was starting to lose sanity already.
The accelerometer controls are accurate, although you may want to adjust the sensitivity to fine-tune your gameplay. I got annoyed when I noticed that Dropple wasn't going as far as I would like him to go after bouncing off a wall, but that's probably just me. I did appreciate the pretty cool soundtrack though, which has a pretty catchy beat.
The game is fun, but at the same time extremely difficult. You only get one life each level, so if you fall to your death you will have to restart the level and lose all your progress on collecting coins. It's a real test of sanity as you have to do your best to balance your character while using nothing but tilt controls.
The game implements the OpenFeint social gaming network, so you get plenty of achievements and can share your scores on Twitter and Facebook to see if anyone can beat your score.
Don't worry about saving the game - the game is automatically saved for you, so if you need to stop, you can just pick up the game later and start at where you left off. But it should be noted that there is no saved-state for the game using iOS 4 multitasking - when you go back into the game later, it will load everything up again. Hopefully this can be addressed in a future update. The graphics are also not updated for the Retina display on an iPhone 4.
I'm not particularly great at the tilt-only games, but this is a great game for those that are good at using the accelerometer to play their games. It's specifically a platformer, so even if you aren't great with accelerometer games, but enjoy a good old platformer, then you may want to consider picking this one up.
With just a few things that need to be updated (graphics and saved-state for fast-app switching), this is pretty good platformer overall with a nice soundtrack (though it may get old once you've played enough, depending on your tastes). Easily not a game for the feint of heart. How far can you truly go in this test of sanity?
