Sometimes a game just feels right on the iPhone, and that’s totally the feeling I’m getting with Daddy Was A Thief, the latest game from Crumble Zone ($1.99) and Night Flight ($1.99) developer Rebel Twins. In it you play as a thief (duh) who has just robbed a bank, or if not a bank, some other building with giant dollar signs on the side of it. Pretty sure it was a bank, though.
The game begins with you bursting onto the rooftop of the bank and leaping to the building next door. It’s here that you’ll make your escape, and you do this by literally pounding through the floor of each, well, floor of the building. A swipe downward smashes your thief through the floor, and a swipe upward makes you jump. Your character auto-runs so these are literally the only controls in the game, and it works brilliantly.
The different floors in Daddy Was A Thief contain various items or people that can affect your downward journey. Smash up an electronic appliance like a TV or refrigerator and you’ll zap the entire floor below your feet, disintegrating. Hop into a bathtub and you can take a free ride through several floors at once, with the bathtub protecting you from any hazards you might hit along the way. Run into a granny and she’ll give you a proper kicking, sending you up a couple of floors and potentially knocking you into a hazard that you so carefully avoided the first time through. Of course it could be worse, though: run into a police officer and he’ll waste no time literally turning you into a pile of bones.
Occasionally you’ll run into a Casino floor, which contains a Pachinko-like set of bumpers and a group of green orbs. Bounce your thief off the bumpers and collect the green orbs and you’ll be rewarded with a handsome cash prize. It feels sort of like the bonus stages from the original Sonic the Hedgehog, which is not a bad thing at all, and the Casino mini-game breaks up the smash-through-every-floor-of-a-building gameplay nicely.
This is all just through the first 100 floors or so, which is currently as far as I’ve managed to make it in Daddy Was A Thief. As you get deeper in the building, more items and dangers appear and things get much trickier. I have a feeling that even 100 floors in is just scratching the surface, and there’s even more items and personalities to encounter waiting for me beyond that point.
As much as I love sining my teeth into big, meaty games, I also love those games you know you can jump into on a whim, spend any amount of time with, and know you’re going to have a good time. I think Daddy Was A Thief is one of those games. It should be dropping later tonight around 11pm EST, so toss it on your TouchArcade (Free) app Watch List and we’ll send you an alert when it hits the US App Store. You can also read more early impressions from players in our forums.
International App Store Link: Daddy Was A Thief, $1.99 (Universal)
