You might think physics is boring, but wait just a minute. Did you enjoy games like Worms and Angry Birds when you first played them? Well then, you actually love physics. A popular iOS game which found its way to Android, Cut the Rope, is yet another physics based game, with hilariously cute graphics. To play this one you’re going to have to brains and quick reactions.
Cut the Rope is an adorably illustrated puzzle game. The very first screen when you start playing the game is a cartoon style scene inside a house, of an open front door with a box containing an abandoned creature, with instructions to feed with candy. That creature turns out to be a little green guy called “Om Nom” (full marks for plugging into Internet memes!).
Om Nom arriving on your doorstep
Your job is to feed Om Nom with candy. Because he’s such a hungry guy, you can’t just hand him the stuff, it has to be passed to him via rope. After all – safety is no accident!
Similarly to Angry Birds, Cut the Rope has sets of levels, each with a different theme. In the case of the Cut the Rope, each theme is based around a different box to keep Om Nom in, along with certain little gadgets to differentiate the game play.
As you start the first few levels, hints and tips appear, and this carries through to the higher levels whenever there are new game elements to play with. The whole experience is there to help you along and enjoy things. This ethos even goes to the the point of letting you skip entire levels.
Your first level, showing you how to play
The early levels are simply a case of cutting the rope at the right moment, so that the candy will either swing to the next rope, or land straight in Om Nom’s waiting mouth. Anyone who has studied physics and has an intuition for momentum, and oscillatory motion could well have an advantage here. In other words, if you like to give your phone or tablet to the kids, to keep them quiet for a while, this is a sly way to get them thinking like the next Isaac Newton!
As you progress, you find various new elements, like bubbles which will float the candy, until your pop them. There are sliding rope tethers, which you can use to carry the candy around, and if the candy is hooked onto two ropes at once, you can slide one end back, until the rope turns red. That means the rope under tension and when you cut the rope (TM!), all that energy is released and you can fire the candy like a shot! Other devices include air puffers which allow you to push to your candy, whether it be on a rope or a bubble. In the later levels you even take to space where you can invert artificial gravity! In addition to these devices, there are hazards too, like electrical arcs, and spiders that crawl down the rope wanting the candy for themselves!
Hazards while feeding Om Nom
An added challenge to the game is to collect stars, by having the candy touch them. This adds structure to each level. In many cases, it would be much easier just to get the candy to Om Nom directly. Instead though, you have to come up with plans and tricks to get the candy all around the screen to pick up the stars. Of course, simply feeding Om Nom is enough to progress to the next level, but it’s only by collecting enough stars throughout the course of the game that you can unlock the last two sets of levels.
Magic hats give you Portal-like gameplay
At its heart, Cut the Rope is a puzzle game. Zeptolab deserve great credit for keeping the game fresh by differentiating the types of puzzle you encounter from level to level. Some levels are complicated puzzles where you can take your time and go step by step. While other levels pose a challenge to your reaction speed, either by having to avoid hazards, or by needing to keep the candy’s momentum going, just like sugary Tarzan! Many of the higher levels require both of these traits, and so you’ll need to make multiple attempts just to work out your game plan. It’s this switching of styles that keeps the game fresh, and keep you wanting to come back for more.
Each level set (or ‘box’) has seventy five levels, and there are seven sets in total. That is enough to keep you busy for weeks. Even then, the ‘box’ selection screen promises that more levels are ‘coming soon’. That’s extremely good value when you consider that Cut the Rope only costs $1.00 / £0.62.
I heartily recommend you try out Cute the Rope! (Yes, the pun was completely intentional).
Click or scan to buy Cut the Rope from the Android Market Place
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