Oh, here's a review from
We Play iPhone as well. It's not as enthusiastic as some of the player's responses, and gives the typical "needs more content" response (which is something we're already working on, fortunately
) but is still quite approving of the control and style of the game.
Themed games always show up around holidays, and Halloween is no exception. Skullpogo isn't specifically a game for Halloween, but it happens to have been released around the time, and contains skeletons, zombies, ghosts and other ghouls so is therefore deemed as a themed game. The gameplay however, is very bizarre; you are a skeleton on a pogo stick and have to bounce on top of vampire pigs and bats. It's a strange and fun game, and fits in that casual pick up and play genre along with games like Doodle Jump and Green Fingers. But despite being addictive at first, we found it to be less inviting after a while and it was only the achievements keeping us going.
The gameplay is all about skill and precision, and the challenge is not in avoiding enemies (since they can't hurt you), but in aiming your pogo bounce. This is because to get a large amount of points, you need to form combos, and the higher the combo, the higher the score. Bouncing on consecutive enemies will start a combo, and you have to bounce on another enemy within a certain amount of time to keep the combo going. To help assist your aiming, you can adjust the height of your bounce; either high, middle or low.
The controls have to be perfect in a game that's all about accuracy and Blinkbat Games have done a good job. You can choose from three different control schemes: Tilt, Point or Arrow. Tilt is self explanatory and we found that it utilised the accelerometer well and worked fine, although we are bigger fans of touch controls, so we used them more: The Point controls are simple since the skeleton just follows your finger, but we found the Arrow controls were the best since they allowed pixel perfect precision.
To generate a little variation Skullpogo mixes things up with some power ups and power downs. Freezing the combo timer, becoming heavy with one hit kills and even detonating nukes are some of the game's power ups but reversed controls and other distractions will make you think twice before bouncing on an icon. If you manage to bounce above the top of the screen, you'll grow wings and smash down on top of enemies below which rewards you for your feat.
...the challenge is not in avoiding enemies (since they can't hurt you), but in aiming your pogo bounce...
Skullpogo is played in levels and to move onto the next one you have to bounce on the fire target, which pops up when you are running low on time. This means you have to clear the fire target (and the targets it splits into) quickly and while this sounds challenging, it is actually quite easy, even with a screen full of enemies. Skullpogo's biggest flaw in our opinion is that is actually only has five levels. We found this disappointing since unlike other similar games, Skullpogo has a definitive end. This leaves you to just improve your score without really discovering anything new, and therefore the game becomes less intriguing.
The pixel graphics in Skullpogo look nice and along with catchy music, give the game a good presentation. The inclusion of online highscores and achievements via OpenFeint are greatly appreciated and add tremendously to the replay value, but our main problem was that the achievements were what kept us playing the game. The game is certainly fun, but with only five levels it just doesn't have enough content to be fully recommended.
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