Game reviews: Tumble Jumble, Gangster Rocco and Kamikaze Race - iPhone / iPod Touch

10:30am Tuesday 17th November 2009

By Simon Bull

Here we take a look at three new games available for iPhone and iPod Touch – intergalactic rodent removal in Tumble Jumble, cat and mouse capers in Gangster Rocco and insanely dangerous driving in Kamikaze Race.

Tumble Jumble is a colourful, oddball little puzzle game offering almost limitless content.

Your job in Tumble Jumble is to work for the Intergalactic Rodent Removal Company packing critters into containers.

These aren’t your normal shaped little Earth mammals – these space rodents come in squares, balls, triangles and an assortment of other strange shapes.

They fall one by one from the top of the screen and you must move and rotate each one into a suitable spot inside the container.

You must fit a specified target number of rodents into the container to pass each of the 64 levels.

For one thing you can only move or rotate each critter as it is falling. Once it lands you have no more control. After this you must try to use gravity to your advantage, landing rodents on other rodents causing them to slide or topple into available spaces.

If you don’t organize your blocks properly as they fall then your container will overspill and you will need to retry the level.

Next, power-ups appear during the game to shrink or explode critters they touch, but there are also obstacles such as lasers and dangerous enemies which force game over if one of your rodents touches them.

Trying to arrange the shapes successfully is like a crazy game of building blocks.

Away from the main game there is a level editor so you can keep designing new challenges, online leaderboards to gauge your progress and also Facebook connection so you can boast about your achievements.

The cheeky looking bug-eyed critters, the strange creatures between levels which look like characters from a kids’ cartoon, the sense of humour and the funky music all combine to give Tumble Jumble a really distinctive vibe.

Though I’ve found the controls to be slightly fiddly on occasions and the collision detection between blocks seems a little off once in a while, the game is overall very polished.

Tumble Jumble, from Clickgamer, is an eccentric and enjoyable puzzle game which is easy to recommend.

If Tom and Jerry were ever in a mob movie and that movie had a chase scene, Gangster Rocco is almost exactly what it would look like.

You play as a sharp-suited fedora-wearing rodent called Rocco who is racing down an alley trying to avoid fast-approaching kitties and mouse traps while picking up lumps of cheese which translate into points.

The only controls in the game are tilting your device left or right to move your mouse. You have three lives to survive as long as you can.

It’s an insanely simple concept which is given personality by the game’s cute cartoony graphics, complimented by a groovy, jazzy soundtrack.

With only five levels and three difficulty settings, the game is very light on content.

The gameplay doesn’t change at all, it just gets faster and tougher further into the game. This makes it fine for picking up and playing for a couple of minutes at a time, but the game lacks any sort of depth.

An annoying aspect of the game is the way the cats move as they race towards you. Rather than moving smoothly they kind of judder into view, often flicking across the screen. It can be quite unpredictable and frustrating trying to avoid the cats at times.

Gangster Rocco, from iPhonky, is a game which looks better than it plays in its current form.

It has the potential to be a fun little casual game if it gets a couple of improvements in future updates, such as adding more variety to the gameplay and tweaking how the cats move.

In this game you must race at frightening speeds down an absurdly busy motorway, with no brake and the accelerator jammed.

Using your digit you must touch left and right on the screen to steer your car and overtake other vehicles.

The aim is to simply get as far down the road as you can while avoiding having a crash, which brings the game to an abrupt end.

The old-school simplistic top-down graphics are perfect for the game, while the pumping soundtrack sets a suitably pulse-racing tone.

Kamikaze Race, from Orb Games, is mildly addictive in its own way. Because each game only lasts a couple of minutes there is always the feeling of wanting to play just one more time to see if you can get further than before.

Scores are stored on local and global leaderboards, while there are also three unlockable cars and nine achievements to strive for. For example, if you really want to push your driving skills you can veer across to the opposite carriageway and try to evade oncoming traffic instead.

Kamikaze Race is a game of fast reactions which provides a fun distraction in short bursts of turbocharged play.

It’s a worthwhile addition to the ‘traffic dodging’ mini genre of games available for iPhone and iPod.