Review: Gunpowder for iOS
Originally published at Technology Tell.
Under the cartoony guise of highly approachable, child-appropriate anthropomorphic do-gooding of Gunpowder lies a twisted, sinister mind bender. Gunpowder challenges you on many levels, be it in planning your overall approach to vigilante vandalism or the sometimes complex execution of it all. And although making progress never gets that difficult to do, perfection can be a sometimes herculean feat. This is the hallmark of a well made puzzle game.
Incendio, our once-benign-civilian-turned-rebel-freedom-fighter, wants to put a stop to Boss Grimshaw’s unbridled dominance of his people. With a little help from a surplus of gunpowder, he hits the tyrant in a place he’s sure to feel it: his wallet. The story doesn’t get deeper than this, and really shouldn’t. The Saturday morning cartoon motif works for it, both in its brevity and the resulting art style; it doesn’t take much imagination to picture a roadrunner and coyote caught in an eternal struggle in the background of any of the comic book-inspired panels or stages, and that’s the point.
Each of the games’ 125 stages are layouts of varying complexity, but usually contain a fire, a safe, and a set of piggy banks. Using a limited amount of gunpowder, with which you make trails by the simple drag of your finger, you have to deliver fire to the safe and blow it up. Another important item in your arsenal are powder kegs. Some of these will be placed immovable on a given stage, while a handful are for you to place where you please. Combined, they provide the boom needed to break the safes, and sometimes continue the flame via explosion over gaps.
How all these variables mix gets impressively more creative as the stages roll on. Eventually, new variables are added, like boulders that can be rolled and cannons that can be shot. Sometimes the safe will be on some sort of moving platform, or trains will be running though your map, cutting off your powder trails or moving kegs around. The cacophony of crazy the game rustles together can be daunting, but it’s always clever and never feels totally impossible. I was always left with the feeling of “OK, im close to a breakthrough” upon every failure.
Of course, to get to these further challenges, you have to complete the side objective of blowing up piggy banks sprinkled across each stage. That’s where the game can get very tricky. Instead of getting the flame to one place, it has to get to four (for a perfect score). At its best, its a fun challenge that is one part outside-the-box thinking motivator and one part necessary evil. On occasion it’s just annoying, especially when things get really crazy in later chapters. Also, I found that piggy banks sometimes won’t count if you blow them up after blowing up the safe. This is weird because there’s an achievement for doing just that.
For the most part, Gunpowder a very polished game, and the physics engine that governs it all acts as expected, if a little too expected at times. It can be a little jarring knowing that wherever I place an exploding keg, a boulder is gonna roll the same way regardless. It’s not a huge issue, but a small reminder that you’re stuck on some pretty tight rails.
All in all, Gunpower is a great game. The overall quality shouldn’t be that big of a surprise considering the pedigree behind Rogue Rocket Games; classic titles like Earthworm Jim and Escape from Monkey Island are on the résumés of the studio’s co-creators, and the commitment to fun and quirky gameplay the aforementioned titles embodied is front and center in Gunpowder. It challenges you both strategically and tactically, and does it in perfect, bite-sized chunks for optimal mobile consumption.