Game Reviews

Air Hippo

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Air Hippo
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| Air Hippo

Video games don't have to make sense to be entertaining. Hedgehogs aren't fast, plumbers aren't best equipped to rescue princesses, and doodles rarely get the chance to jump anywhere.

Still, there has to be an internal logic to proceedings, or you're left feeling adrift in a sea of nonsense.

Take Air Hippo, for example, which leaves us to consider the question of why a flying hippo dressed as Santa is trying to deliver presents to floating children.

Sad sack

The game is a riff on the Doodle Jump template. Our heroic hippo leaps out of a chimney, then must bounce on the heads of children at the bottom of the screen in order to remain airborne for as long as possible and deliver the gifts in his hippo sack.

But leave the children too long and their material desire will overtake their patience, sending them leaping up towards the hippo, mouths greedily agape as they attempt to steal the toys that are rightfully theirs.

You swerve around by tilting your device, and when the hippo has reached the apex of his leap he'll tumble back down. You have three lives to begin with, but you can buy more via an in-app purchase system.

Tapping the screen makes you move more quickly in the direction you're already headed, letting you dodge the attentions of avaricious toddlers or quickly deliver a gift to a child yet to be consumed by the unquenchable desire for things.

Sacked

There's very little content to be found in Air Hippo, and that which is there is of questionable merit. Everything's put together reasonably well, but there's a distinct lack of fun in the repetitious, poorly controlled shenanigans.

There's the germ of an interesting idea here, but its never given a chance to grow, and quite often you'll die without being able to work out what it is that you've done wrong.

Air Hippo is a bizarre coming together of various strands of successful App Store trends, but rather than meshing together to make something greater than all of them, it ends up as a tangled and boring mess.

Air Hippo

Even if your one goal in life is to play a game where you control a hippo dressed as Santa, it's probably still worth giving Air Hippo a miss
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.