Food Run
A one-touch platform game from the creator of Kick Flick Soccer.
Developer Kevin Ng has made a name for himself creating simple yet compelling one-touch games for the App Store. Kick Flick Soccer is one of the slickest soccer shoot-out games you can get for your iPhone, while WordCrasher Blitz mixes up the word-building genre.
His latest project Food Run is an altogether different kettle of fish. It stars a jaunty, jogging egg who moves automatically through each level. Your one-touch taps of the screen cause him to leap over gaps, avoid wandering monsters and dodge perilous traps. Your ultimate goal is to pick up all of your food friends peppered around each level, grab as many stars as possible, then lead them towards the finish as a conga-line of comrades.
Entertaining though the early days are, the game only really deepens towards the second half of the third set of levels. Prior to this, you'll find it relatively easy to bounce your auto-running character cleanly over gaps, slide down barber poles, and dodge bars of spikes which would otherwise spell a sticky end for your hero. You might perhaps missing the odd star or fruit through fumbled fingers, but a full clearance is never more than a second run away.
Get into the later stages of the game though, and you'll have to contend with artfully blended obstacles - bounding monsters you need to bop off to get a little extra height, left and right-running conveyor belts which slow you down and speed you up, as well as a few clever levels that feature platform blocks which pop into existence, just as you think it's all over. In these latter moments of the game, you get a much clearer idea of what the designer's capable of, and we hope a future update will add more of the same quality and challenge.
While the bulk of the game is simple, it never stops being entertaining, and we think you'll also be won over by the clean visuals and 70s-sitcom jazz that noodles away in the background - very catchy. You may breeze through the bulk of the content relatively quickly, with the only replay value coming from collecting every last star and piece of fruit, but however you approach the game we think you'll find this money well spent.
What's Hot:Bright and breezy, Food Run has plenty of charm and a decent selection of levels to keep you entertained for a time.
What's Not:The game is a little too easy in the early stages, and we'd like to have got stuck into more of the taxing content.
3.5/5
