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…
Loop Mania
On our podcast this week, you can hear us talking a lot about our Game of the Week pick, Loop Mania (Free) from Umbrella Games, and specifically talking about how it’s one of the harder games to describe out loud. I’m going to go ahead and say that describing it in written words is even harder, making this post a little difficult to write. So to make my job a little bit easier I’m not even going to attempt to describe what it is you do in Loop Mania, and instead I’ll point you towards this very easy to understand half-a-minute trailer.
See? It’s not that hard of a concept to understand after even just a few seconds of video, but trying to describe how you’re a circle inside another circle and there’s circles chasing you on the outside of that circle and you’re jumping back and forth within the inner walls of the main circle and all the while you’re collecting little tiny circles like coins and… yeah forget it.
Complicated explanations aside, Loop Mania is a freakishly enjoyable game. It’s got all the signs of a perfect mobile game. It’s easy to play in portrait with just single taps (though it supports landscape play as well), the game sessions are short and it’s super fast to retry, and it’s a high-scoring game with a lot of subtleties that might not be immediately apparent, giving it a certain strategic depth that similar one-note high-scoring games don’t have.
For example, you can earn score bonuses by collecting all the coins in the inner circle multiple times in a row. Or you can score extra by leaping across and smashing more than one circle at a time. Even more lucrative is smashing circles in succession creating a combo which can really crank up your high score. You can simply play in order to last as long as possible and that’s fine, but if you start to learn the little tricks to scoring it becomes like an entirely new ballgame.
Loop Mania is a brilliantly designed and executed mobile game. It’s also free and ad-supported, with a 99¢ one-time IAP to remove those ads, something I did within the first few minutes of me playing. It doesn’t take long to appreciate how awesome Loop Mania is, but it’ll take a long time to perfect my skills and obtain a respectable score (someone in our forums has already breached the 30k mark, which is insane). There’s really no reason not to check this one out, and I’m sure Loop Mania will have a permanent spot on my device from now on. This one’s a keeper.
