As a casual fan of developer SMG’s other games, One More Dash (Free) was one of the first things I downloaded this week. I played a few rounds, and it seemed pretty good. Alas, there were a lot of other games to potentially review, and it fell by the wayside. As usual, some of them turned out to be great, and some were not so great. As I closed one app and flicked through my homescreen to find another, my eyes kept falling on Dash. I began playing it more and more, and it slowly began to take over my free time. Don’t be put off by it’s simple appearance, readers. This one’s a keeper.
The last game the studio put out, One More Line (Free), was something I wanted desperately to love. I’m a huge fan of slingshot mechanics, and the visual style of the thing was great. Unfortunately it never really clicked with me, partly because it required a level of precise timing I just didn’t seem to have (pre-updates). Dash seems almost like a second chance in this regard, because it’s also a one-touch-timing sort of game with a similar art style. Mechanically, though, the game is a lot different, and–in my opinion–better.
You play as a circle (why not?) who just wants to go UP as far as possible, as circles do. Your only method of travel is by jumping across other, larger circles (or nodes) with a well-timed tap of the screen. It’s the timing that’s important, because rotating around the other circles are various configurations of colorful walls and spikes that threaten to end your run quicker than Ketchapp publishes games.
If you could take as long as you wanted to make a perfectly timed move, however, there wouldn’t be much challenge. To account for this, each new node you hop to rapidly shrinks, effectively lighting a fire under your annular butt. It keeps the intensity up and means most rounds are fairly short (which is exactly how it should be for these quick reaction type games). Luckily, you can safely hit the walls (but not spikes) and keep bouncing back to your previous node while you wait for an opening.
It may sound pretty simple so far, and it is for the most part. However, there’s a teeny-tiny bit of strategy involved that adds a subtle layer of depth. See, while most nodes have one “point” that adds to your score, some actually have three. If you use the aforementioned “bounce back” strategy, though, it will take away one of the points you could potentially earn. This means you’re often faced with a choice between a risky move to collect all three points on a node, or bouncing back while you wait for a safer opening and only getting one or two points. It’s a small thing, but needing to quickly make that decision every couple of nodes really adds a lot to the experience.
If any of those descriptions are confusing, it’s mostly due to the abstract nature of the game. Everything is circle-based, if you couldn’t tell. That doesn’t mean it looks boring, though. It’s actually a remarkably beautiful game, in its own minimalist kind of way. Plus, if you don’t like the way the game looks out of the box, you can unlock new color schemes by spending the in-game currency consisting of–you guessed it–circles. These are found pretty easily just by playing, or you can watch a video ad and earn three at a time. Finally, there’s a mission system with 200 goals that will net you two for each goal you complete. It took some time, but I managed to unlock every color set without spending a dime of real money. There’s also a shop to buy new avatars (mostly circles, of course), though it should be noted that every time you unlock something, the price of everything else goes up. Also, there doesn’t appear to be any option to start with a random color scheme every game, which is kind of a bummer.
One More Dash is probably not going to change the world. I feel like we probably make statements like that a lot around here, which I guess is a reflection of how many of these fun little time wasters there are popping up every week. It shouldn’t be seen as a slight, though, because how many games actually do change the world? SMG’s latest release changed my week, at least, since I didn’t expect to spend anywhere near this amount of time with it. But here I am, writing a full review. And all I can think about is closing the MacBook and playing one more round…
