Dodo Peak is well-trodden territory, and anyone who’s ever played Q*bert, or Frogger, or Crossy Road or anything like that will know the script here. If you’re looking for a brand new experience that will change the gaming landscape you might want to look as far away as you can. Nothing I’ve told you here will have you peeling your face off and screaming that you never knew such originality was possible. It feels like the sort of thing that would have been ripe for microtransactions had this been a standard free-to-play mobile game instead of an Apple Arcade one, but instead here you just unlock them through good old-fashioned hard work like back in the day. Some of them aren’t even dodos, which feels like sacrilege but there you go. Collecting them will increase your overall coin tally which can then be spent on different dodo outfits, which in turn affect the speed your dodo runs at. You get one star for simply beating the level, but the others are given for a variety of tasks which are different in each stage: it could be clearing it within a set time, collecting an optional red gem along the way, wiping out all the enemies on a stage, or what have you.Īlong the way you’ll find coins lying around. If it wasn’t clear that this was originally a mobile game, the fact that each stage scores you out of three stars should make it obvious. Crabs follow your own movements, monkeys always move in your direction, you know the drill. Each world has its own different environment – beach, snow, the usual sort of thing – as well as its own enemies, which have their own movement patterns. There are 60 stages in total, split into six worlds. The watermelon makes your dodo move extremely quickly, which is useful when you’re trying to beat the level within a certain time (more on that in a bit), while the sort of radish-looking thing makes you invincible for a brief period, letting you kill enemies and stride through obstacles unharmed. There are also a couple of power-ups you can collect to make things a bit easier. Sometimes it’s worth making your way through the harder bits first and saving the easier section until later when it’s easier to get past with a long ‘tail’. What seems like the most obvious path through a stage may be deceiving, because the last part could be trickier to navigate when you’ve got a bunch of babies behind you. As the stages get more complex and the number of eggs increases you’ll welcome this, because it means you get the freedom to experiment with different routes through each stage. Thankfully, there aren’t any lives in this game, you get as many tries as you like. You can’t drop some off and come back for the rest: you have to collect them all in one run, meaning by the time you’re heading to the exit you’ve got a big long string of babies behind you that you have to guide away from danger. This gets even trickier in later stages where you’re gathering four, five or maybe even more eggs. You might be able to slip past an enemy, but if a baby behind you hits the enemy instead that still counts: you’ll need to start the stage again. That’s hardly a groundbreaking gameplay mechanic, of course, but there’s a twist.Įach time you hatch an egg and start trailing a baby behind you, the baby will also be vulnerable. Obviously it’s not as easy as that: each stage is also inhabited by a variety of enemies, and one touch will put your dodo on its arse. The world is made up of cubes, and you play as a dodo who can hop from cube to cube.Įach stage has a set number of baby dodo eggs dotted around, and your aim is to head out, find each egg (at which point it’ll hatch) then escort the babies back to the starting point where they’ll be safe. The general concept feels like what you’d get if you took the arcade classic Q*bert and based it on rescue missions instead. It’s a good job it did, too, because while it’s a fairly basic game in the grand scheme of things it’s also an entertaining one that’ll keep you busy for a while. It’s finally broken free of its iOS shackles, though, and arrived on the Switch eShop this week. Switch, Apple Arcade (Switch version reviewed)ĭodo Peak was a launch title on Apple Arcade in September last year, back when we all still naively thought that for the foreseeable future we’d be outdoors with our phones a lot. Screenwave Media / Moving Pieces Interactive
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