There are plenty of things I appreciate about Cartoon Survivor (Free), a new isometric platformer from Australia-based Spunge Games. Most immediately, it has a strong and cohesive visual design, full of bright colors and cute animations. The level designs are clever and packed with secrets to find, some of which may require you to come back with gear you’ll earn later in order to get the best time. There are unlockables both of the cosmetic and practical type, giving you something tangible to shoot for as you play through. It also gives you enough levels for free to get a feel for the game before it asks you to pay to unlock the rest, and in an unusual turn, allows you grind up in-game currency and pay that way. You’re probably waiting for the other shoe to drop right about now, and it will. But don’t worry, it’s only a little shoe. A booty, at best.
Before I get to that, let’s talk a little about the game’s premise, because it’s kind of weird and adorable. The producer of the show Cartoon Survivor is at his wits’ end. The ratings are low, and this show is his last chance. To make things worse, his last star didn’t quite live up to the show’s title. His only hope lies in his latest applicant, Doo Doo, a lanky, squawky bird who can run, glide, and say his name. He’s also quite adept at wearing helmets, which is a more rare quality in birds than you might guess. Anyway, Doo Doo’s job is simple. He just has to run from the beginning of each stage to the end, collecting coins and avoiding death. To make things exciting, he’s got a stick of dynamite attached to his back, so he can’t exactly dawdle around.
Your time limit is based on the length of the fuse you choose for your dynamite stick. The shorter you go, the more stars you can earn on each stage, and the more money you’ll be rewarded. In addition to these stars, each stage has three trophies placed somewhere around the level. Early on, they’re pretty obvious and not far off the beaten path, but as you play into the game further, you’ll really have to keep your eyes open for secret areas and paths. If you need another goal beyond that, the game keeps track of your best time and posts them to Game Center leaderboards, giving it a competitive element that certainly doesn’t hurt.
Cartoon Survivor offers up 23 levels spread across four different worlds. The first world is playable for free, with the remaining worlds opening up for $1.99 each or $2.99 for the set of three. While each level by nature can be finished in a handful of minutes at the longest, you’ll almost certainly have reasons to revisit them. It would be virtually impossible to get yourself onto the golden path on the first try even if you happened to bring the right gear with you. Doo Doo constantly runs forward, and though you can turn him from side to side by tilting your device, you can’t make him go back. Like many auto-running platformers, the game uses this to pull some nasty “gotchas" on the player, but it’s at least usually clear about what you should do the next time to get to where you want.
That means there’s a fair bit of memorization involved in navigating the levels, which when combined with the timer gives the game a bit of a racing feel. Enemies are often fixed obstacles and might as well be walls, since Doo Doo can do nothing but take the hit if he collides with them. Some other enemies move around, and they can be a bit more annoying for a couple of reasons. You never quite know where they’ll be when you get to them, and the collision detection is sometimes hard to get a handle on. This is a typical problem in isometric games, but it’s a bit worse here than normal because the enemies tend to be large and it’s never quite clear which part of them you should be avoiding. All Doo Doo can really do-do is jump and glide, so you don’t have many tools to deal with the baddies even if you see them coming. There were so many times when I tried to jump over an enemy’s tail only to have it appear to suck me in and give me a lump, and it was annoying every single time.
That issue aside, it’s easy enough to play. You have to be able to get on with tilt controls, though, or at least you have to at the moment. The developer is apparently adding some other control setups in an update, but in the current version, you have to tilt your device to steer Doo Doo around. Tapping the screen will make him jump, tapping again in the air will make him glide, and a convenient button allows you to dash a limited number of times. I didn’t find it too troublesome, but many members of the TouchArcade forums did, so you might want to give it a try first and see how you get on with it. The only thing that bothered me about the controls was how slowly Doo Doo seemed to turn. It’s difficult to get from one side of the path to the other quickly, and that’s vital in more difficult stages.
At the beginning of the review, I praised the cohesiveness of the visuals. It really does look great, with a style of its own. The UI, on the other hand, has some big problems. Once again, I understand the developer means to address this in an update, so hopefully my complaints will soon be for naught. At the moment, though, the game uses a pretty odd layout to get around. It’s more difficult than it should be to access the shop, for example, and switching from world to world, or even trying to go to the next stage, involves a lot of unnecessary work. In a game where so much importance is placed on gathering up coins, that shop button should be everywhere. Instead, in my zeal to get to the next level, I often don’t spend my coins. I cash them in when I start the game up again and am at the top level menu, but other than that, it’s a split-second annoyance I can’t be bothered with. While I’m nitpicking, I’d love the restart button to be slightly more accessible while you’re in a level. When I’m trying to hit a record time and slam into a wall, I want to be able to hit that button right away.
The economics of the game are a bit off for what it’s trying to do, too. I love that there’s a free portion with the rest unlockable by IAP, and I love it even more that there are options for those who want to open them up another way. The in-game coin prices to open up the other worlds are very high, and I assume the idea is that you will be watching more than enough coin-doubling ads to make up for the real money cost. But coins aren’t only used to unlock new worlds. They’re also used to unlock new costumes, which are cosmetic, and new helmets, which have gameplay benefits. I feel like the coin intake is just a bit too low in relation to these items, especially if you’re not watching ads. That’s probably an unintentional side effect of setting things up in consideration of the world unlocks, but I feel like paying for the full unlock should mean that you don’t have to grind or watch ads to get those items through a regular playthrough, particularly the ones necessary for optimal navigation of the levels. The economics could use a little adjustment, and in checking the latest from the developer as I write this paragraph, I see that they will also be getting tweaked in the upcoming update.
I like that even though Cartoon Survivor is basically an auto-runner, the stages appear to have been constructed with a more standard platfoming experience in mind. It helps the game stand out a bit in a very crowded pack. Some of the game’s problems are inherent to the isometric viewpoint it’s played from, such as how difficult it can be to gauge where objects are in relation to Doo Doo, while others seem to be more of the surface-level issues that tend to crop up in developers that are new to mobile, like UI issues or limited control options. The developer seems committed to fixing the latter, but there’s not much to be done about the former. This is all, of course, presupposing that you’ve got room on your plate for another auto-running platformer, however stylish and unusual this one might be. Cartoon Survivor packs delights and annoyances in near equal measures, a combination I know has its fans. For anyone else? Well, the first bit is free for a reason.
