Twist n’ Catch: Angle your phone and rotate your way to the treasures and freedom!
“Well, shake it up baby now… Twist and shout… Come on, come on, come, come on baby now… Come on and work it on out…” Ahh… I dunno why but the name suddenly made me think of that smash hit song Twist and Shout. I digress, check out what we thought of this game below.
Gameplay: You play the role of Emmet Black who’s an explorer that steals diamonds and sapphires. He’s this fatty who puts his life in the hands of little monkey who lowers him down into caverns via an old and decrepit rope. The game uses your phone accelerometer, so the angle you hold your phone at is the angle which your little man will travel along. He’ll automatically be lowered down, but when you touch the screen he’ll be pulled back up again. The aim is to grab the diamond and get out with it in one piece.
At first the physics kind of makes sense… gravity is at the bottom… and there’s momentum in your swings. However… this very quickly becomes quite insane because when you loop around a block and rotate 180 degrees, then gravity would have turned with you… that’s right… you can fall into the direction which you’re being lowered.
Anyways… remember this is a just a game!! So moving swiftly on… the aim is to grab the diamond and dash out before the time runs out. Ideally you also want to get the three sapphires that are dotted around too. Once the clock is down to zero, the traps activate and deadly spikes will appear and slowly raise to the top of the screen. Watch out though… one slight touch can stab you to death easily!
Good stuff: Content here is through the roof (in the full version)… there are loads of different types of puzzles across the various exotic locations. At first you start off just doing the basics with looping around ledges, but slowly this becomes more and more complex and your reaction times need to improve with the stages. There are buttons to move ledges, oscillating spikes, rolling spike balls…. I’ve spent hours playing the press version and in fact I’ve delayed this review because I was so hooked!
Overall: You can definitely feel the game polish here. The graphics are cutesy and clean… all the music matches with the areas you’re stealing in… menus look cool and are pretty fast. The only downer is that the restart buttons are a bit odd and we sometimes found that we would jump to the next stage when we meant to restart a stage. Oh, and it’s a tad slow at restarting a level. Other than that, when Emmet dies he goes “Waaahhhhh” and pops out of the screen… much like how Rick Dangerous used to die (… yup… it’s really annoying!) [You can play the flash version or Rick Dangerous here]
Rating: 4/5 Packed to the brim with a variety of different puzzles which will have you twisting your phone all day! [Editor caveat: we’ve not checked the number of levels in the Lite version yet]. If you’re looking for a game which is a puzzle and it involves skill too, then this is it. We were a little bit close to giving this one a 3 star because there are some slight annoyances with the Physics, but with so much content you’re going to be playing for ages!
Twist n’ Catch Promotional Youtube Video
Twist n’ Catch Tips from Android Games Review
- Remember that the level will end if the diamond is smashed, so it may sometimes be better to grab the diamond at the bottom before going for the other sapphires.
- Many levels can be fully completed by going down once and coming up once too. However, sometimes you may need to drop back down another root to grab the sapphires.
- If you’re finding it hard to grab all the sapphires, try to optimise the speed of falling by not grinding into any of the walls.
- Using your momentum to swing around objects can increase your movement speed slightly.
- There’s a delay between when you touch on the screen and when you get pulled up. To improve your grab rate (and not overshoot any gems) then touch the screen when Emmet is about 1 diamonds length away from your target gem.
Twist n’ Catch QR Code
(Click on the image or scan the barcode with your Android phone to goto the Android Market)
Developers: Okugi Studio
