Macenstein

GAMES THAT DON’T SUCK is a feature dedicated to games that I think are well worth your hard earned money, but not worth me sitting down and spending 3 hours crafting an in-depth review (these things are 99¢ after all). However, you can rest assured that any game bearing Macenstein’s GTDS rating is worth buying, sight unseen, based solely on my expert opinion.

Gravity Guy [iPhone 99¢, iPhone Free, iPad $1.99, iPad Free] is at its heart a reflex game – something I usually don’t go for, but for some reason I became obsessed with it this last week.

The game is extremely simple – in concept, that is. In reality, it’s borderline impossible. As you can see from the below video, the gameplay is similar to other games like Canabalt, The Impossible Game, and Robot Unicorn Attack, where your character is constantly running to the right. All you need to do is tap anywhere on the screen to avoid obstacles. What makes Gravity Guy unique, however, is that instead of simply jumping over obstructions, tapping on the screen actually reverses the game’s gravity, meaning suddenly instead of running on the floor, a tap will send you running upside-down on the ceiling. By alternating taps, you’ll be able to navigate the increasingly difficult levels, often making seemingly impossible jumps.

As if making perfectly timed jumps wasn’t hard enough, Gravity Guy throws in a robotic flying security guard that will shoot you if you should slip up.

I think one of the reasons I really like Gravity Guy is that unlike other similar games, dying never send you back to the beginning – instead you are merely sent back to the last checkpoint. And checkpoints are usually no more than a 15-30 jumps apart, meaning you have time to gradually memorize each new jump sequence until you get it right. Of course, getting it right will mean PLENTY of dying, so if you’re one of those people who gets easily discouraged, you’ll probably want to pass on this one.

Rounding out the list of features of the game is a “practice mode” where you can revisit any level you’ve unlocked, as well as a multi-player mode, which works better on the iPad than the iPhone as all players (up to 4) play simultaneously on the same device, but it’s still fairly fun.

Gravity Guy is the very definition of a casual game. I completed Gravity Guy in about a week or so, playing in 10-20 minute increments whenever I had time. The game really sucks you in, and the fact that you respawn almost instantly after a death tends to make it hard to stop giving a level just “one more try”, hoping this time you’ll make it. (A word of warning, I have spent literally a full day trying to get past a level, dying HUNDREDS of times and swearing the level was impossible before I figured out what I needed to do).

Anyway, I have already said too much. If you like challenging games and clever level design, you should go buy Gravity Guy now. If money’s an object, I recommend the iPhone version, whether or not you plan to also play it on your iPad, as the game moves so fast, the retina graphics look almost the same as the standard definition graphics until you die and the screen stops moving.

Go get it now and then come back and leave me a comment telling me how right I was.

You’re welcome.