Game Reviews

Meganoid

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Meganoid
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| Meganoid

Do you fear death? You won't after booting up Meganoid, a punishingly cruel platformer in the vein of '80s and '90s platform games – a genre recently re-animated by Super Meat Boy on Xbox Live Arcade.

The developer of the latter has said that Meat Boy will not work on mobiles, so how does Meganoid fare?

Touch and go

On one level, it's perfect for gaming on the go. Every level will take less than a minute to complete if done right, but doing them right becomes progressively more difficult.

Pixel-perfect jumping and careful timing is the order of the day, with all kinds of obstacles to prevent you from getting to A to B. It’s compulsive stuff, and you certainly feel the urge to keep trying no matter how mean the game is feeling.

The problem, as Team Meat predicted, is the touchscreen.

Using the standard controls, you have 'left', 'right' and 'jump' buttons on-screen, but slipping off them ever so slightly results in the action not being taken or, worse, stopping mid-flow.

The controls have been kept simple for this reason (weapons will automatically fire), but games like this should never allow you to blame anything but your own incompetence, and unfortunately the imperfect controls give you the perfect excuse for death number 4,567.

Hardcore

The developer seems aware of this, and there are other control options, including the Android Game Gripper, keyboard, and Wii Remote. None was available on my handset (by all means ignore this review if you play your Android games with a peripheral), and enabling tilt controls caused even more avoidable deaths.

The good news is that dying isn't really penalised. Once you use up your default three lives (on average, every 53 seconds), you can restart your last seemingly insurmountable challenge where you left off.

The game has a wonderful retro feel to it, with catchy looping midi music and charming pixel-art graphics. It's also free and promises regular updates, to keep masochists busy well into the night (or past their intended bus stop).

Ultimately, it's hard to see how a developer could make a better hardcore Android platformer than this, but you may decide the genre is best left to a more suitable format if the touchscreen is your only option.

Meganoid

Masochists need only apply, especially if you're stuck with just the touch screen, but if the sight of a pixelart hero meeting a thousand deaths doesn't turn you off, Meganoid is well worth your time
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Alan Martin
Alan Martin
Having left the metropolitan paradise of Derby for the barren wasteland of London, Alan now produces flash games by day and reviews Android ones by night. It's safe to say he's really putting that English Literature degree to good use