Friday, September 2, 2011

Spin The Nut - 0.99 (P-O-M Apps)

Spin The Nut is a new puzzle game from P-O-M Apps in which you try and get an acorn to the end of the level to feed the squirrel. You’ll also try and collect 3 golden nuts while getting the acorn to the end. The quicker you collect the golden nuts and make it to the squirrel, the better your score will be.

We’re given 80 nicely designed levels to try and get through, spread across 4 different worlds, with plenty of different objects to have the acorn interact with along the way, like bouncy platforms that are stationary, and then later in the game become platforms that you can move, spikes, helicopter baskets, pieces of wood that break after using them once, signs that will change the direction of the acorn while it’s in the air, and loads more.
The controls in Spin The Nut are done very well. To shoot the acorn, you place your finger on the piece of spinning wood that it’s stuck to, and then slide your finger away from the acorn so that you can see which direction it’s pointing. When it’s aimed in the direction that you want it to go, you let go of the screen, and it’ll shoot forward. There’s no gravity, so you don’t need to account for that, and the acorn will automatically stick to the next piece of wood it comes in contact with. Later in the game you’re also able to move the rotating pieces of wood that the acorn sticks to by single tapping on it to move it, and double tapping on it to activate the firing ability.
The graphics in Spin The Nut are polished and professional, and look very good. The squirrel is extremely cute, and the movement animations are done very well, and the music and sound effects fit with the cutesy vibe going on. The backgrounds, however, are not varied, and although they do let you see the objects throughout the levels very well, they feel pretty bland. For instance, in the treehouse world, the background is yellow with slight shaded in areas resembling branches, in the helicopter world, this changes to a pink background, and as you move on, the background color changes, but nothing else does. I don’t know how much the backgrounds were played around with, but seeing backgrounds that really match the worlds you are playing in could help liven up the game quite a bit, for instance, having an actual forest or tree background for the treehouse world, and the sky with some clouds for the helicopter world.
Spin The Nut is supported by GameCenter, and has 4 different leaderboards, one for each world, which helps add to the drive of getting as good of a score as you can in each level, but there are no achievements, and in a puzzle game like this, achievements go a long way. However, it is a pretty unique puzzle game with nice graphics, and great physics. The objects and gaming mechanics given to us are great, especially with the game only being $0.99. Spin The Nut is definitely a puzzle game that I will play through all the way, and will most likely go back through trying to get better scores and move up in the leaderboards. P-O-M Apps has shown that they have what it takes to make a nice puzzle game with great physics, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they add with future worlds, and what they have in store for us with their next game.


Spin The Nut is getting a score of 7.5 out of 10





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