After wiping their noses with the millions of dollars recouped from Angry Birds and Cut the Rope, Sticky is the orange blob that carries a studio’s expectations on his lack of shoulders.
When the company behind iDevice blockbusters such as Cut the Rope and Angry Birds release a new title, gamers everywhere stand up and take notice. With excellent presentation, easy-to-understand game mechanics and a lovable protagonist, Sticky hopes to retain the team’s excellent quality control.
Like the aforementioned successes, the opening moments of Sticky are a revelation. Through some brief static screens we learn that Sticky is an energy blob created through a lab accident of Professor B Bunsen and his lab assistant Dr Globule, with the latter unwittingly becoming the maniacal villain of the piece in the same event.
Soon Dr Globule is able to command an army of sludge monsters and just Sticky stands in their way. For an failed infinite fuel source experiment-turned-orange blob, he’s had quite a day.
The core gameplay of Sticky involves flinging our orange hero across the screen and bashing the heads of sludge monsters, racking up combos as you go.
Sticky literally sticks to orange goo at the top and bottom of each stage, while clicking on Sticky’s body and manoeuvring your finger allows you to see the trajectory of the orange blob in any one direction. It’s a neat concept and the sticky physics are well realised.
We’re not quite sure if the mass of orange glob on Sticky’s head is a quiff, though we hope so
If you’re reading this review and thinking that Sticky sounds like a perfect platforming title, you’d be correct. It would be, but it isn’t. Instead Sticky is a blend of a physics and time attack gam, as each level tasks you with stopping a certain amount of sludge monsters from exiting the pipe at the opposite side of the level.
The key is to co-ordinate your attacks so that Sticky manages to take out two enemies from one sling, snooker-style, while successful attacks allow gamers to breathe a sigh of relief and plan their next, ahem, flings. Unfortunately, planning is quite difficult as the camera is set to close to the action throughout the game. A handy bubble icon points towards the off-screen sludge monsters and their collective numbers, but the ability to zoom out and gauge their position is severely missed.
Similarly, another missed opportunity are Sticky‘s power-ups, which vary from freezing enemies or a super bounce item which has you shooting around the level, completely to your detriment. Power-ups are mostly to be avoided, while a couple of ‘bullet-time’ items wouldn’t have gone amiss – or perhaps something as simple as a radar or clickable map.
Like all of Chillingo’s efforts, Sticky is polished and honed to a degree not typically found in iDevice titles, particularly those that command a sub-€1 price tag. However, unlike its forbears, this physics title suffers from glaring omissions that impact longevity and more importantly, the fun factor of our time spent with the orange blob. Let’s hope then that Chillingo stick with their new hero in the form of feedback-centric updates in the next few weeks.
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