In Splashy Slime, you must navigate thirty 2D levels using just one button as a ball of green slime named Splashy, who is probably a ninja-in-training. My favourite thing about Splashy Slime is its control scheme. Despite its apparent simplicity, German developer paranoiax did a lot with it. If you can call it running, Splashy runs from left to right automatically until he/she/it bumps into a wall and turns around. To jump, you tap the screen. The longer the tap, the higher the jump. If you’re touching the screen when you run into a wall, you do a wall jump that I would never have guessed Splashy is in good enough shape to pull off, which is one of the reasons why I think he/she/it is training to be a ninja.

The game loads in a little over six seconds on my Droid Razr HD running KitKat, and the loading screen explains the controls. In case you’re one of those people who doesn’t read the tips on loading screens, the first four of the thirty levels serve as a tutorial that explains the controls again. The problem is that both of these sources are a bit misleading. They say “Tap to jump” and “Hold to jump higher,” which implies that there are only two jump heights: one for tap, one for hold. It would have been more accurate to say “Tap to jump” and “The longer the tap, the higher the jump.” After that, the tutorial teaches you how to wall jump, how to use springboards, and the most important lesson of all, “Remember: if it’s spiky it kills you.”

Remember: if it’s spiky it kills you.

The object of Splashy Slime is to reach the exit sign in each of the levels without getting killed by the multitude of bottomless pits and spikes that are out to ruin your day. The game never explains what’s at the end of these exit signs that mean so much to Splashy that he/she/it is willing to risk his/her/its life, but jumping over saw blades and avoiding spikes both sound like skills that would be taught at a school for video game ninjas. This is the other reason I think Splashy Slime takes place at a ninja school, and I never saw Splashy in a history lesson to disprove this hypothesis.

I never expected a mobile game to do platforming as well as Splashy Slime, but I do have some gripes with it. As is the case with many platformers, there are coins you can collect. However, there’s no reason to collect them, so they end up being annoying rather than adding to the game. In a hardcore platformer, I would expect the coins to add another layer of difficulty for those brave enough to try collecting them, but paranoiax misses that opportunity.

There are three different environments, but the only one I liked was the dungeon between the forest levels and the winter holiday-themed ones. The dungeon appeals to my affinity for dark themes in video games and literature, and it’s the only level where all the spikes and saw blades don’t seem out of place. The dungeon levels also feature hanging platforms that aren’t in the rest of the game, making the game play slightly different. The other two environments don’t do this. The woodlands and the holiday environment would be indistinguishable given a paint job, and the spikes look out of place in both of them. All three environments also share the same music, which is a shame because having three background songs would have made the game’s biggest problem a little more bearable.

Just like I never expected anyone to make a good platformer for mobile devices, I never expected anyone to make a game with music so bad that the game is better on mute. I usually like chip-tune soundtracks, but Splashy Slime‘s is easily the worst part of the game. The music in the trailer is actually pretty good, so I’m not sure why it’s horrible in the final product. Splashy Slime touts itself as “an impossible hardcore platformer”, but I stopped playing more times because I was sick of the music than because I was frustrated by the difficulty. I ended up playing the second half of the game on mute, and it only took that long because the mute button also silences the sound effects.

Despite some design flaws that keep it from being as good as it should be, Splashy Slime is a great game that exceeds my previous expectations of mobile platformers. It’s a free download on Google Play, and I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind playing it on mute.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

10 Second Ninja will make your heart race, your palms will be constantly soaked in the sweat of stress, and your sense of time will be reduced to intervals of ten seconds. Why? Because Dan Pearce, a BAFTA award winning developer no less, has deemed it necessary to condense the best parts of break-neck platforming down to the rigid constraints of a stopwatch.

And it’s bloody brilliant.

The game has you take control of a ninja on a quest to destroy Robot Hitler and his army. Being the unpleasant fellow that he is, Robot Hitler has banned all ninjas, and so begins your swift journey of vengeance as you cleave your way through his army of Nazi robots, and eventually even Robot Hitler himself.

Everything that makes 10 Second Ninja great can be traced back to that damned ten second timer. Your time is everything, down to the millisecond. It’s tense, perhaps more than it should be, but there’s something almost inexplicably compelling about trying to shave your best scores by even a fraction of a second. Figuring out the fastest path will have you returning to each level time and time again like a twisted drug addiction, adding buckets of replay value to what could have otherwise been a one-time experience.

In an effort to help you achieve the best scores possible, your arsenal includes a sword with a deceptively large arc of attack, a double jump that can help you change course mid-flight, and three shurikens that can help you skip sections all together with a bit of timely precision. Learning to master these three simple mechanics can help you knock seconds off your time.

And then there’s the leaderboard. If 10 Second Ninja’s timer is the drug, then being able to see everyone else’s score on a worldwide leaderboard is undoubtedly the dealer of this score-obsessed addiction. Never before have I been so compelled to try, time and time again, to beat the scores of other players as obsessively as I did in this game.  To say that achieving a high slot on the leaderboard is fulfilling would be an understatement, but perhaps more importantly your time on there will be fleeting as everyone else attempts to vie for the top spots, turning the rush for domination into a finely tuned arena for only the most dexterous.

10 Second Ninja doesn’t complicate things. The gameplay is simple enough to pick up and play without much guidance, and yet at the same time allows for more experienced and score-hungry players to experiment within the confines of each level in an effort to minimise their completion time. With the added drive of leaderboard dominance and fluid animations all around, this is one addiction I will struggle to shake for a long time.

Oh and I’m currently third place worldwide on Canyon, so if you could just not beat that score, that’d be great.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

10 Second Ninja was released March 5^TH on PC & Mac.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.