Everyone has been anxious for the first release from Prettygreat, a small studio started by former Halfbrick developers earlier this year, and that moment is quickly approaching. Land Sliders is the name of that first game and they’ve just announced that it’ll be arriving in the App Store this Thursday, September 24th. Land Sliders involves guiding your character around a randomly generated world by swiping the ground they stand on. As you explore you’ll be collecting items, avoiding enemies, completing quests and solving puzzles.
At its core Land Sliders is a high-scoring game. As you collect every item from each level you can move on to the next, harder level, and you’ll keep going as long as you can with your main score being how many total items you’ve collected. I’ve been playing a pre-release version of Land Sliders for a couple of weeks now, and I’ll be honest, at first I wasn’t very impressed. It felt like a neat control gimmick, but it didn’t seem like there was much “game" built around it. I stuck with it though, and once things started to “click" I became hopelessly hooked on it.
Once you become comfortable with the land sliding (or the option of hero sliding, which is what I prefer) Land Sliders becomes one of those compulsive “one more go" games that rivals the best the App Store has to offer. There’s sort of a controlled chaos feel to sliding around that’s really exciting, and the game is filled with really interesting enemies with varied attacks and lots of interesting mini-quests and puzzles peppered throughout that break up the main collect-a-thon part of the game. Death typically comes suddenly, and almost always could have been avoided if you were just a bit more careful, and that sends me back to the retry button over and over again.
On top of the wonderful gameplay loop, Land Sliders is stuffed with some of the best unlockable characters I’ve ever seen. A clothes dryer? Yep. You can play as a clothes dryer. These characters inject a lot of personality into the game, and each has their own little upgrade tree so there’s reason to want to play with them all. Unlocking characters uses the familiar Crossy Road (Free) style of randomly unlocking one for 100 coins, with coins being earned through play and given away as a prize after set intervals.
While I don’t want to oversell Land Sliders before it’s even out, I will say I haven’t been so taken with a game in quite some time, nor have I ever been so happy to have my first impression of a game turn out to be incorrect. It’s a high quality effort from top to bottom, and I think it’s really got that intangible special sauce that the greatest mobile games have. I’m stoked for everyone to get their hands on Land Sliders this Thursday to see other peoples’ reactions and if you all will enjoy it as much as I have been.
