Spikey's Bounce Around Review

I've been promising to start doing iPhone game reviews for a while now, and while it's possible that there is only a single person who reads my blog an iPhone, I'm still doing it.

Spikey's Bounce Around is a relatively simple little causal game made by Donut Games. Donut Games has been running a promotion offering three of the titles from their catalog for free. I've always been a sucker for a cheap/free game, so I picked up all three. While I haven't spent as much time in the other two as I have in Spikey, they all seem to be pretty decent with high production values.

The object of Spikey's Bounce Around is to shoot your little spiked ball around the stage to free butterflies. If your ball passes through a leaf/flower/stick cluster, it will disappear. If you remove all the plants from underneath one of the butterfly jars, the jar breaks and the butterfly is free. Free all the butterflies and you pass the stage. Spikey will stick to walls and other similar things but bounce off of the yellow and blue "bouncy" platforms. There are also other spikes and jarred wasps that cause you to instantly fail. Finally, you only have a finite number of times you can throw Spikey around, and in some stages, you are forced to make a single, perfect throw. There are 50 stages in all, and I can guarantee you that some of the later stages are really difficult; the difference between passing the stage and not is often the difference in a few pixels of aiming.

The controls are simple, but effective: merely tap where you want him to go. You can also hold down and adjust the directional arrow to get precisely the right shot. All shots have the same power, and the power is not enough to negate gravity entirely, so lots of shots involve lobbing Spikey just right across the screen. All in all, the mechanic works quite well and the levels are unique and varied.

Without a doubt, this is the game I have sunk the most time into on the iPhone. I've found myself sitting on the couch with the TV on trying to get a specific shot just right over and over again. Even after you beat all the stages, you can try to get the 3 star challenges on each which involve getting high scores, usually by using a fewer number of shots. I've three starred most of the stages, but am still working on the rest.

While Spikey's Bounce Around does not revolutionize anything, and the game play is not in any way deep, for a casual little iPhone game, it works AMAZINGLY well. I would easily recommend the game to anybody, especially while it's free, but I would have paid $2-$3 for it and come away happy. Pick it up; it's fun.