C’mon, admit it… you’ve always wanted to run away and join the circus, haven’t you? Well, okay, me neither, but the circus is still pretty cool. Now, thanks to the game Knife Toss from Crawl Space Games you can experience two of the coolest parts of the circus at once – knife throwing and clowns. Of course, depending on your aim the clown won’t be so happy, but it’s all good fun none the less.
Your job in Knife Toss is simple: pop all the balloons on the spinning wheel while avoiding the poor clown that’s strapped to the same wheel. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Well in the early stages it’s not so bad. As the levels progress, however, you might start to run out of time. And then there’s that pesky health meter that the clown has. Hit the defenseless jokester too many times and its game over. To make matters worse, there are occasionally power “downs” that will take time away from the counter or increase the speed of the wheel (thankfully there’s nothing that does additional damage to the clown). How will you combat these woes?
The best way would be to never miss, and always hit balloons instead of the clown. Good luck with that. Thankfully, there are some power ups to help you prolong your craving to hurl dangerous instruments at innocent humorists. One power up will actually slow the wheel down for a bit, while another stops it completely for a couple of seconds. There’s even a power up that will add 10 seconds to the clock. But that’s not all! If you act quickly you can hit the Bonus board that pops down every few levels and you’ll get play a bonus round. During the bonus round it’s just you against the balloons, and you can earn extra time, health added back to the clown, and more points, all in the same round!
This game could have been a simple point-and-click affair, and as the wheel started moving faster it still would have been challenging. However, they took it a step further, which makes it both more challenging and more fun. You have a crosshairs that determines where the object will be thrown and which you move by tilting the device. When the crosshairs is in place you tap the screen to throw your object (a knife for the easy level, cleaver for medium and a hatchet for hard). The thing you need to keep in mind is that even though you have a balloon under the crosshairs when you tap the screen, it most likely won’t be there once the object you’ve thrown has hit. The key to Knife Toss, then, is accounting for the speed of the wheel and the fraction of a second it takes to throw an object when determining where to place the crosshairs in relation to a balloon. It definitely takes more skill as the levels progress.
The game uses OpenFeint for leaderboards and achievements. There are 30 achievements to master, so it should keep you busy for some time. As for the leaderboards, in addition to competing for top score you can try to go for longest streak, which is the number of balloons popped before missing one. Some people might feel like this is more of a mini-game than a standalone product, but that’s fine with me. Not every game needs to be an in-depth affair that takes hours to complete one round. The main thing I’d like to see is bonus health for the clown as one of the power ups – at least in the easy level. Right now the only way to increase the clown’s health is on the bonus rounds, and even though it’s not difficult to hit the sign that get you into the bonus, there’s no guarantee you’ll get the right balloons while you’re in the bonus round.
Knife Toss looks pretty good. The clown is cute, and the more he gets hit the more humorous his facial expressions are. If you accidentally hit him in the foot he’ll even have a band-aid on it afterwards. I was a bit surprised that the background in the easy level was more detailed than the medium level. I would have expected it to be the other way around. It also would be really cool if you could have the ability to unlock other people for your targets – maybe even a bear? And for those of you concerned parents there is no blood, so this game is kid safe. The sound effects are decent enough, but not overly thrilling. I would have expected more silly noises given the overall atmosphere of the game. The clown makes a couple of different remarks from time to time, but he could use a few more for his repertoire. There is a short tune that plays during the menu, and something that passes for music during the ending stats screen, but nothing that actually plays while the game is going.
Overall Knife Toss is pretty fun. It’s certainly not a game you’d play for hours on end, but it’s a nice diversion when you don’t want to play a game for hours on end. In other words, it’s a good “on the go” game. It could use a little more variety in terms of visuals and sound effects, and some background music would be great. What’s there is pretty solid, though, and if you’re into the whole achievements thing there’s a lot to keep you busy. It’s also a pretty decent game for kids, as long as you make sure they understand that it’s not polite to throw knives at clowns in real life! This one is definitely worth giving a shot if you’re into quick casual games.
Overall Score: 8/10
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