The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
Levelhead
After releasing a handful of highly playable mobile titles that featured heaps of their extremely peculiar brand of humor, developer Butterscotch Shennanigans blew minds when they launched the massive action RPG Crashlands in January of 2016. We gave it 5 stars in our review, chose it as Game of the Week, and picked it as our Game of the Year for 2016. So yeah, it was real real good. But how do you follow up a game like Crashlands? The Bscotch fellows have been working on that answer for the past 4 years, and after a year in Early Access on Steam, that follow-up title Levelhead has officially launched on a number of platforms including mobile.
Much like Crashlands before it, Levelhead is an immensely ambitious title for a tiny studio like Butterscotch Shenanigans. It aims to provide a platforming experience with a level creation aspect on par with something like Super Mario Maker, which you know, is made by one of the biggest video game developers in the universe. No pressure! What they’ve managed to accomplish is not just impressive for a team of their size, but would be impressive for a team of any size and, without getting TOO hyperbolic, Levelhead manages to do some things even better than heavy hitters like Super Mario Maker.
I think the real genius of Bscotch is how they’ve spent years developing their own backend infrastructure and online profile system, so that creating and sharing levels is as simple as can be and works seamlessly cross platform. The level editor itself is no slouch either, and is super intuitive to use and mind-meltingly powerful once you learn its ins and outs and max out your imagination. This is a game where damn near anything is possible, and thanks to the vibrant and dedicated community that’s built up during its time in Early Access, Levelhead even upon its release already features so much amazing content I can barely wrap my head around it.
Don’t think you have to have the creator bug just to enjoy Levelhead though. Not only does it feature a massive campaign to play through and master on a number of levels, but you can so easily sort through and find incredible content created by other players that you’ll likely never run out of things to enjoy. That this is a fully paid title and not free to play is also something of a shocker on the mobile platform, so if you love platforming games and are willing to dedicate yourself to warming up to the virtual control scheme (or if you just want to use a physical controller) I can’t recommend checking out Levelhead enough.
