Cut the Rope iPhone Review - The Next Angry Birds?
Finally, a game that might make you put down Angry Birds.
Cut the Rope has everything you want from an iPhone game: immediate fun, excellent use of the touch screen, and an exuberant personality. The goal is very simple – get a piece of candy into a waiting monster's mouth by slicing through a series of ropes. Like Angry Birds, you must apply basic physics to your game plan, such as cutting certain ropes in a specific order to swing the candy over the monster before snipping the final string.
There are three stars in each puzzle, too, that you need to collect by swinging the candy into them. You can complete a puzzle without capturing all three stars, but doing so not only increases your score, it also helps unlock future levels. The pacing of the stars is so smart. In the first dozen or so stages, collecting all three stars is easy. But then collecting only two is easy. Pretty soon, you feel great just getting one star – but you are so hooked on having all three that you keep playing stages over and over, chasing the thrill of getting a perfect score.
Cut the Rope has everything you want from an iPhone game: immediate fun, excellent use of the touch screen, and an exuberant personality. The goal is very simple – get a piece of candy into a waiting monster's mouth by slicing through a series of ropes. Like Angry Birds, you must apply basic physics to your game plan, such as cutting certain ropes in a specific order to swing the candy over the monster before snipping the final string.
There are three stars in each puzzle, too, that you need to collect by swinging the candy into them. You can complete a puzzle without capturing all three stars, but doing so not only increases your score, it also helps unlock future levels. The pacing of the stars is so smart. In the first dozen or so stages, collecting all three stars is easy. But then collecting only two is easy. Pretty soon, you feel great just getting one star – but you are so hooked on having all three that you keep playing stages over and over, chasing the thrill of getting a perfect score.
There are several areas in Cut the Rope, each loaded with over 20 stages. As you slice deeper into Cut the Rope, things definitely get more complicated, but never frustratingly complex. New hazards are introduced, such as spiders that crawl along the strings, elastic ropes that snap your candy across the screen, bubbles that float the candy up (and sometimes into trouble spots, like spikes), and air vents that push swinging candy when you tap them. Learning how to both avoid and (often) use these features is critical for getting the prize to that sweet tooth of a monster. The puzzles are so expertly created – seriously, I never found a bum puzzle in the bunch – that you can see the solution when you start, which gets you hooked on piecing together the steps necessary to get that three-star rating.
If there is anything in Cut the Rope that might frustrate, it's the puzzles that require speed and precision. Now, it's not that Cut the Rope isn't playing fair here. It is. You just need to be fast. And to be sure, I really liked the challenge of these puzzles, slicing ropes in a certain order as the candy swing around the screen. But if you are really struggling to slice through exact ropes, perhaps the HD version for the iPad will work a little better for you.
If there is anything in Cut the Rope that might frustrate, it's the puzzles that require speed and precision. Now, it's not that Cut the Rope isn't playing fair here. It is. You just need to be fast. And to be sure, I really liked the challenge of these puzzles, slicing ropes in a certain order as the candy swing around the screen. But if you are really struggling to slice through exact ropes, perhaps the HD version for the iPad will work a little better for you.
