German studio Daedalic Entertainment is mostly known for their point-and-click adventure games, among them the Deponia saga. Now, get ready to take your iPad to the Stone Age, where a you'll be accompanying a rather dimwitted Neanderthal by the name of Ungh through ten crazy levels, using your superior Cro-Magnon brain to help him solve puzzles and reach his ultimate goal: FIRE!
So where's the fire? There's not much of a story to tell, really. The likeable, yet somewhat stupid Neanderthal Ungh has accidentally allowed his village's fire to go out. As matches and lighters aren't exactly easy to come by in the Stone Age, the rest of the village is understandably livid, and Ungh is banished once and for all. Having failed his people, Ungh feels compelled to make up for his terrible mistake by finding them a new fire – and maybe then they'll let him back in, too. And what better place to find fire than at the volcano just over the horizon?
More Than Just Club-Swinging
Your job is to accompany Ungh on his journey through the game's ten two-dimensional levels, helping him to solve all kinds of puzzles. Most of the time you'll be scouring the environment for objects and interactive elements that might prove useful, like in any classic point-and-click adventure. There's also a button at the bottom of the screen you can use if you don't feel like looking too hard – just tap it to reveal anything on the screen that’s worth a closer look. You see, unlike in the PC/Mac versions, there’s no mouse pointer that changes color when you move it over a usable item, so this button can be extremely helpful at times. And besides, even when it’s clear which objects you can interact with, the actual solution to the puzzle is usually anything but obvious.Along with the obligatory caveman club, there are a variety of items Ungh can use throughout the course of the game. Most of the puzzles can be solved logically enough, but a few of them can only be solved after some heavy use of trial and error. The controls for the most part consist of simple screen taps and swipes. Only in certain mini-games will you really have to prove your timing skills, along with dexterity and sensitivity in your fingertips, which adds a bit of variety to the game. But no matter what you’re doing, the touch controls work really well, though in some of those mini-games, it’s clear that they can sometimes make things more complicated than they need to be, compared to the mouse-and-keyboard controls of the PC/Mac version.
The goal of each individual level is to rescue a small creature that will help you by clearing the way to the next level. Like I mentioned above, FIRE has no real storyline to speak of. There isn’t even much of a connection between the various levels, so that it’s less a single held together by an overarching storyline and more a disjointed series of mostly independent puzzle worlds arranged in an order that is more or less arbitrary. Fortunately, the levels are really diverse, each featuring more than a fair share of the skewed sense of humor that pervades the game. Without giving too much away, you can rest assured that the in-game locations are by no means limited to dark caves and broad steppes. Each level has enough content to keep even seasoned fans of puzzle games busy for at least thirty minutes as they work to complete a wide variety of challenges.
You’ll have to explore, combine items, and occasionally even plan ahead if you want to solve all the puzzles and earn all the bonus coins, which you can use to unlock concept art. As you’d expect of a Neanderthal, Ungh communicates with the player using only gestures and guttural sounds, so Daedalic was able to dispense with any actual voiceovers. But Ungh is surprisingly good at letting you know what he’s thinking or how he feels using his face and hands, and he’s usually pretty funny, to boot.
Even on the modern medium of the tablet, it’s impossible for FIRE to avoid some of the classic problems that have always been associated with adventure games. While each level consists of more or less three segments, which you can switch back and forth between using the arrows to the left and right of the screen, the game can be just as nervewracking as classics like Monkey Island sometimes could. Several puzzles have you going all the way from one end of the level to the other, and then back again, ad nauseam. Like I said above, sometimes you have to use trial and error more than anything else, and it’s these parts that really had my patience wearing thin. But the levels really aren’t all that big, which helps to keep this problem in check, not to mention the fact that Ungh’s normal walking pace is pretty swift for a caveman as it is.
Cartoony Cave-Painting and Upbeat Rhythms The cartoony 2D graphics are really colorful, giving the game an overall happy feel, the better to underscore the humor of the puzzles. The background music is also pretty upbeat and goes great with the game’s visual style. Unfortunately, the music can get pretty annoying at times, especially with the more high-pitched tones. Luckily, the menu options allow you to regulate the music and sound effects however you like. The sound effects are actually really well done and fit in perfectly with the game’s overall, rather ridiculous theme.
good
thx :)
Good