Game Reviews

Micronytes

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Micronytes
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| Micronytes

This reviewer invented whole new swears while gamely trying to complete Micronytes.

‘Scum of a motherchumper’, ‘Fraking knell’ and, a less comprehensible, ‘Bunting norferarrr’ were all uttered in the quest to express just how ‘frinking’ frustrating this Android platformer is.

Cheaply designed, with a ludicrous default control system and a near vertical difficulty curve, these Micronytes deserve every cruel death they get.

Body horror

The story, relayed in a budget animated cut-scene, shows a hospital patient dying of some strange disease. Instead of sensibly paging Dr House, the hospital sends a microscopic (inner) space crew on a mission to seek out and destroy the infection.

For each level, you have an endless supply of Micronytes willing to lay down their lives across four distinct (well, different colour skinned) stages of biological-themed bouncing.

Eventually, one may be able to leap over sufficient stomach acid pits, ricochet between ample disappearing red cells, and perform enough intestinal wall jumps to actually disinfect the ‘evil greens’.

We wouldn’t count on it, though.

Hopping mad

Finely tuned controls are integral to the balance of pleasure and pain in hardcore platforming, making Micronytes’s insane default layout all the more baffling.

Holding the left or right side of the screen makes your character move in that direction and jumping is controlled – sit down for this, please – by shaking your phone.

Even after fiddling with the calibration tool, it barely works on the practice levels and, once split-second timing is required, the constant screen juddering is like playing Super Meat Boy in an earthquake.

Yes, an alternative virtual pad has been provided in a patch, but even that is sticky and unresponsive, making the simplest of wall slides a clumsy chore.

Like the more appealing, 8-bit themed Meganoid, Micronytes is further evidence that touchscreens and precise platforming are still a leap too far.

Micronytes

Broken controls and weak presentation make this clumsy platformer a Nyte to forget
Score
Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo