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I’m not sure how I feel about the game Sling Kong (Free) for many reasons. I was looking forward to it a lot because Protostar’s Checkpoint Champion (Free) is a nearly perfect game.
Sling Kong has a system like a slingshot, which is close enough to my favourite game mechanic, grappling hooks, that I was really looking forward to this one. I finally got it, and while it’s fun and worth downloading, it does a few things wrong, even though I understand why they were done that way.
In the game, you pull back like a slingshot to launch the cute animal character from one peg to the next. If you don’t like it when cute animals die, you might not like Sling Kong. Plants that shoot flames! Crushing mechanisms that block! Buzzsaws! It’s very dangerous to be in the jungle! Plus, you can play as one of 40 different characters, including a virus. You’ll also see some animals in places where they don’t belong.
Both Sling Kong and Checkpoint Champion have ridiculously high production values. People use the word “polished” too much, but man, that might be the best way to describe the game. Protostar did everything they could to make this cookie clicker game look the best it could. The animation of the characters is great, and there are a lot of small effects that add to the polish. The pig blows up into bacon, and the snowman melts slowly. The characters in these kinds of games are very important, and Sling Kong has a lot of them. Also, as you move up the board, the game shows you the high scores of other players, which is one of my favourite parts. It keeps making me sign in to Game Center, even though iOS keeps logging me out.
I do think that the way you play the game has a lot to do with how well you do. There are times when the angles to get to the next peg are so tight that it’s hard to tell what’s safe and what’s not. One small change could send you to your death or help you move forward. Or sometimes you just go back to the peg you were on before! As far as controls go, I wouldn’t mind having an arrow or being able to touch and drag anywhere on the screen to aim.
Failure seems to happen more by chance than for a good reason most of the time. If there was some kind of looming danger, like a rising flood or lava, that could explain why you have a lot more room to fall to your death than you did before. Even if you didn’t, you’d probably hit a spike or danger point, but it still feels like the game is telling you when to fall to your death and when to fall back to safety.
Still, Sling Kong is very hard, but that’s because it’s meant to be played quickly. Games usually only last a minute or two, if that long, so it’s easy to move on to the next one. So, even though you will fail a lot, you can at least keep going and going. It is definitely an interesting design. It looks like you can only use the revives at certain times. This doesn’t bother me, but it seems that the game will sometimes give you a video ad instead of a revive. I didn’t quite understand how it was supposed to work.
I love how the slinging is so important to so much of the cookie clicker 2 game. The lucky sling is when you throw your character at a fast-spinning wheel. In the character select, you can choose from a list of different creatures, but you can also sling to choose the one you want. It works out pretty well. The game does a great job of, so to speak, fitting into itself.
I do think, though, that the game misses the point of how Crossy Road makes money. For instance, if I see a character I like, I can’t just pay money for it right away. You can buy more coins to play the prize game more times, but that’s not a guarantee. And the rate at which you get coins from video ads, which is by far the easiest way to get them, is high enough that you can get enough by playing the game to play another round. This might get more people to buy things inside the app, but Crossy Road worked because you could choose between taking your chances and just paying for what you want. So, I don’t think this is something that other games should try to copy. Still, it might bring in more money. As a player, though? I like it less than I used to.
Still, it’s fun to win each character in the prize mode, because the bonus mode reminds me of the bumper bonus room in Sonic 3 and Knuckles. Hey, Sega, you should make a mobile version of that game. It’s chaotic, and you don’t know which character you’ll get, but I guess it’s interesting because you don’t know what will happen. Plus, since the five characters you can win change over time, you know what you could get instead of trying to get a random character out of about a hundred.
