Indie developer 232 Studios came up with something interesting that I’ve been checking out lately, a one-touch platform puzzler for iOS devices titled Epic Eric. Imagine having a knight in a full suit of armor swinging, bouncing, jumping and sliding around trying to get to his lady love. Yup, falling would mean game over in each of the bite-sized levels available in the game.
Each level presents a unique challenge (or a combination of some), and all of them require players to make use of the environment through some clever application of physics and timing. In other words, there will be quite a fair bit of trial and error. Unlike platformers like New Super Mario Bros, players are not timed in Epic Eric. Instead players are rated based on the number of stars they managed to collect en-route in each level, bringing about the saying “sometimes it’s not about the destination, but the journey”.
The graphics featured in Epic Eric are pretty to look at with the game being animated really well, complementing the one-touch gameplay. The one touch gameplay is the heart and soul of Epic Eric (or Erica, if you choose to swap characters at the main menu, just tap on Erica who is hanging out at the top of the screen), and you only need one tap on the screen to tell Eric to release whatever he is grabbing onto at the moment, to jump, slide, or bounce off to something else…. I think the proper term here would be it’s context sensitive. Just get the timing and the direction right and you are good to go.
The combination of highly polished graphics AND gameplay makes Epic Eric one of the more interesting releases in 2014, and we highly rate it at 4.5 out of 5. The game is available on the App Store for just 99 cents, and that’s a steal. Check it out over here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/epic-eric/id662886078?mt=8
