In Catch the Candy [99¢ / HD], the new game from BulkyPix and FedoIT, you play a fuzzy little fellow trying reach your one true love: a shiny piece of candy. While a bit reminiscent of Cut the Rope’s Om Nom in looks and desires, our anonymous protagonist doesn’t have nearly as many resources helping him out. You won’t find yourself manipulating strings or bubbles or anything like that – this little guy can only use his arm.
This limitation leads to some great one-touch gameplay. Your arm is more like a grappling hook. Tap on something, and your arm will fly out to it and stick to it or nudge it (depending on the surface type). Early on, it’s easy to use these talents to reach the candy. Tap the ground and you’ll drag yourself along. Tap an overhead beam and you’ll swing into the air. Tap the candy once you can reach it, and it’ll come straight to you.
Sounds easy enough, but Catch the Candy doesn’t take long to get complicated. You’ll need to move objects around, climb sheer cliffs, swim underwater and do all sorts of crazy stunts to get to your precious candy. This can lead to some frustrating situations where you just can’t get your arm to latch onto the right thing, but there’s a quick level restart and even a level skip if you get stuck.
That leads me to Catch the Candy’s big flaw. Your goal is to get to the candy in the fewest taps possible, but nothing really pushes you to conserve your taps. There are Open Feint/Game Center achievements for finishing the game with the fewest total taps possible (and opposing achievements for using huge amounts of them). But you can ignore those and tap hundreds of times each level if you’re having a rough time. This is a game that desperately needs a star system to rate your performance.
It’s a shame, too, because otherwise Catch the Candy is a lot of fun. There are frustrating levels – you try climbing over a sheer wall using only your arm – but most of the current levels are great. Some are even delightful. I’d rather not give any surprises away, but in later levels you’ll find yourself playing whole other games‚ with your arm. Even the more mundane levels often have entertaining backdrops. I never expected to climb Mount Doom arm-first, but there you have it.
If the achievements are enough to motivate you to keep your taps low, Catch the Candy has plenty of replayability. There are 53 levels currently, and BulkyPix has also said more are on the way. I definitely haven’t had enough of some of the mechanics we get to see in later levels, so I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
