Game Reviews

Tin Man Can

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iOS
| Tin Man Can
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Tin Man Can
|
iOS
| Tin Man Can

It's not enough nowadays for a game to show promise. It has to follow through, ensnaring players for more than a couple of minutes, if it wants to really climb to the highest heights of the App Store charts.

Unfortunately for Tin Man Can, after a reasonably impressive opening it never quite manages to pull itself out of the sludge of mediocrity that so many half decent games get stuck in. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's nothing to write home about either.

Floater

The game casts you as a robot from the future who manages to get sucked into a wormhole. To get home, you need to traverse four different dimensions using your slightly lacklustre hovering engine to fly over gaps and obstacles.

It's a neat enough setup, and the first few levels are intriguing. The controls are stark and simple - you push a finger on the screen to engage your engines, and release it to turn them off. You only have a small amount of fuel, though, so you can't get very far.

Your rockets charge back up again after a second on the ground, or you can grab pink floating orbs in order to give your engines an in-flight boost. But after a while the gameplay starts to stagnate and frustration kicks in.

There's almost no room for experimentation or deviation from the path. You get one shot at getting across a massive gap, and if you're even a few pixels off the correct trajectory you'll miss that fuel boost you needed and end up plummeting to an untimely robotic death.

Dimensionless

It's a shame, because there's a genuinely interesting game here, but it gets lost beneath some poor design choices and repetitive gameplay. Even the boosts and extra vehicles the game adds as it goes along don't detract from the stringent linearity and one-note play.

Tin Man Can is a game destined to be forgotten - another also-ran in a field of other titles that had decent ideas but just couldn't see them through. There's potential here, and clearly talent as well, but the experience is one that you'll be all too happy to see the back of.

Tin Man Can

While there are occasional flashes of what might have been, Tin Man Can is too bland to recommend
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.