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TouchArcade Game of the Week: ‘Leap Day’

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The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.

These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.

Without further ado…

 

Leap Day

Platforming games on touchscreen have always had a rough road to travel. Decades of the genre growing and evolving based around physical controls meant most developers simply tried to emulate that with virtual buttons on a touchscreen, which can work okay but doesn’t allow for the type of precision that’s often needed in the more demanding platformers. The auto-runner kind of solved this by removing the need to move your character and simplifying everything down to a button or two, meaning you could focus more on the action and less on where your fingers might be placed. Auto-running platformers aren’t a replacement for traditional platforming games, but they’re very well-suited for mobile and have pretty much spun off into their own unique genre.

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All this is to say that Nitrome’s latest release Leap Day (Free) nails the auto-running platformer built for mobile better than any game I’ve seen come before it. It’s played in portrait, and requires just a single tap to do everything, making it easy to play anytime or anywhere for pretty much any length of time. Each day features a new level that’s built like floors in a tower (or in a Tiny Tower, if you will). Your nub-limbed, blank-eyeballed character runs back and forth on its own while you time your taps to jump, double-jump, or wall jump your way up to each new floor. You’ll need to do so while avoiding spikes and all manner of crazy enemies with different movement and attack patterns.

Levels are super duper long, but every few floors there’s a checkpoint, and this is how the monetization comes into play. You can either watch an ad or spend some in-game fruit that you’ve collected during play to enable each checkpoint. There’s not enough fruit to enable every checkpoint in a level, so you have to pick and choose which ones you think will be the most worthwhile to enable, adding kind of a cool strategy to the mix. If you don’t want to deal with any of this, a $3.99 IAP removes all ads and simply enables every checkpoint when you reach it. That sort of removes the strategy of “do I go for this checkpoint or hold out?" but Nitrome is working on a solution for that for those who have bought that premium unlock.

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Perhaps my favorite thing about Leap Day is how nimble your little character can be with just a single-tap control system. The movement of the running and jumping and the way you grab on to walls and slide down all feel spot on. The way the double jump works is cool too, as you can initially only double jump one time, but if you manage to grab onto a wall or jump off an enemy’s head you’ll be able to perform a subsequent double jump. If you use what’s around you strategically you can string together a bunch of double jumps in a row, and in fact you’ll have to do just that to pass certain points in a level. It’s way more strategic than you’d think coming from a single-tap game. All this comes together brilliantly to make a game where you feel as bad ass as you do playing Ninja Gaiden on the NES but accomplish it all with simple taps.

There’s also the daily levels to consider. The game will generate a level seed based on the date of the device, so no need to connect to an online server or anything like that, meaning that theoretically we’ll have a new level to play everyday until the end of time. Nitrome also very thoughtfully collects each day’s level on a calendar, so you can always go back and replay them for free as long as you played a level at least once during the day it was new. If you happen to miss a day entirely, you can still go back and play that level after the fact by unlocking it through watching an ad.

It really feels like Nitrome thought of everything with Leap Day, and it’s one of those games that feels darn near like a “perfect" mobile game. It’s also challenging as all get out, and there’s many times I’ve come across a section I thought was simply impossible only to pass it after trying and retrying and figuring out the proper strategy, which is an immensely rewarding experience. This one will live a long, happy life on my iPhone and seeing as it’s free there’s no reason you too shouldn’t be playing Leap Day right at this very moment.

  • Leap Day

    Leap Day is a fast paced action platformer with a brand new level every day! ...no really EVERY DAY! ...like until the E…
    TA Rating:
    Free
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