Years before Diablo, Star Craft, and World of Warcraft, an early iteration of Blizzard known as Silicon & Synapse released a cross-platform title called The Lost Vikings, an adventure-puzzler that gave the player control over three Vikings lost in time and space. Each playable character had a different set of abilities, and the goal was to switch back and forth between characters, using their talents in concert to guide all three Vikings through progressivelymore difficult levels. Take this mechanic, add some Pokémon, The Adventures of Lolo, and 2D Zelda,and you have Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, a mobile game on the Kindle Fire HD (among other platforms) developed by indie studio SleepNinja and published by Cartoon Network Games that, sadly, is far from the sum of its parts.
In MAMBC you control Nikko, a boy living in a JRPG-style island village, who wakes up on his birthday to find that, surprise surprise, his cake has been stolen. Following a trail of crumbs (and his wiener dog, Bazooka), Nikko crashes into the wilderness in search of his cake, where he soon discovers both the shadowy Boogins, who like to steal food and make fart jokes, and an assortment of friendlier and more colorful monsters, each of whom has a special ability they will use to help Nikko recover both his cake and the suddenly missing Bazooka. They, also, like to make fart jokes.
There’s a fair amount of fart jokes, is what I’m saying.
The island is divided up into four playable worlds, each divided into several levels of obstacles, and the player controls Nikko and three pre-selected monsters per level.
The player must switch control back and forth from Nikko and his monster pals, using everyone’s abilities together to gather up all the cake pieces in each level (as well as accomplishing level-specific secondary activities). Nikko can push blocks, one monster can charge forward and destroy tree trunks and Boogins, another emits a sonic scream that shatters crystals,etc., etc. The monstersare plentiful, but the strategy of figuring out what monster to use where is undercut by the game automatically assigning specific monsters to each level.
The greatest strength of MAMBC is its art direction, which is what you’d expect from a Cartoon Network published title. This is a world of brightly-colored construction paper cut-outs; playing the game feels a bit like playing with Colorforms. The dialogue is well-written, too, and cut scenes (more than you’d think) are funny and entertaining.
You only wish that the gameplay were so inspired. Most levels boil down to a few repetitive environmental obstacle puzzles, most of which are solved by the stock solution of pushing a block or tapping a floor plate. This, combined with immense amounts of backtracking as you jump around from character to character, not to mention the slow pace with which the characters move (something that’s especially noticeable on your many return trips to the village to buy items and get assigned fetch quests by Nikko’s neighbors), add up to a game that borders too close to tedious.
The game also suffers from some janky controls and poor collision detection. You guide characters by dragging a path for them across the screen,and you trigger their powers by double-tapping. Often, though, the screen scrolls ahead of your finger, messing up your path, which wouldn’t be so bad if characters didn’t stop in their tracks when impacting against even the tiniest corner of an obstacle. Additionally, sometimes you double-tap to trigger a monster’s power and accidentally switch to another character, or the monster turns and THEN triggers his power, forcing you to line up your shot again and start over. (In particular, getting Nikko in position to push or pull a block can be controller-throwing frustrating). Finally, on more than one occasion my character was impaled when crossing a pit of retracted spikes that decided, just for one instant and for no apparent reason, to re-activate, even though the block I had pushed onto the controlling switch was still sitting exactly where I had left it. A video game, mobile or otherwise, should never be allowed to ship with such a horribly annoying bug.
MAMBC is great for a $0.99 game, and good for a $1.99 or $2.99 game. For a $4.99 game, though, even one without in-app purchases, I can’t recommend it. As a developer, SleepNinja shows promise and I look forward to their next project, but they still have a ways to go.
Hardcore?
No.
Great design aesthetic and characters crammed with personality can’t save the platformer’s broken controls, poor collision detection, and puzzles that are far more tedious than they are clever.
