Game Reviews

Cling Thing

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iOS
| Cling Thing
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Cling Thing
|
iOS
| Cling Thing

If somebody were to ask you to design the quintessential Chillingo game, you would probably come up with something very close to Cling Thing.

I mean, listen. Cling Thing is a physics-puzzler. It contains a one-eyed monster with long rubbery, sticky tentacles that it can shoot out in several directions at once. You have to use these tentacles to navigate your way through dozens of stages, avoiding hazards and collecting stars.

As you make your way through this already-derivative game new elements are constantly being transplanted in from other games - the portals from Portal, the cannons and rickety structures from Angry Birds, the gravity-inverting power-ups from Cut the Rope.

By the end, Cling Fling is like a game mechanic-themed episode of Drawn Together.

Have I seen you before?

But, despite its generic premise and its breathtaking level of plagiarism, Cling Thing is worth downloading. It may not be original, but it's good.

This is largely down to clever sandbox level design. The game usually has a solution in mind, but you're left to find it on your own using the tools at your disposal.

Quite often, getting to the sucky tunnel at the end of a stage involves nothing more than a sound grasp of how the various objects in the game will interact, and if you can master its little toybox world of motion and elasticity and stickiness and gravity then you can even improvise your own solutions or find little shortcuts.

Cling Thing has such a solid physics engine that you almost feel as though you're reaching in and manipulating its stretchy cords and rubbery platforms directly.

You make my heart sing

As the game introduces more and more elements (nodes that you can pivot around at a fixed distance; bubbles that hold you in place; patrolling spike monsters) or starts making more pointed use of its existing elements (for example, in later stages you have to use the floaty properties of water to slingshot you around hazards) your freedom to innovate is increasingly restricted.

This isn't a big deal, because your freedom is never very great in the first place. The fun in Cling Thing lies partly in solving puzzles, but predominantly in mastering the physics necessary to execute your solutions.

The puzzles are often clever and satisfying, the stages are diverse and usually well-designed, and the physics are excellent, meaning that Cling Thing - which is currently the most derivative game I can think of, swallowing up other ideas like a rampant Katamari of plagiarism - is far better than it has any right to be.

Cling Thing

Cling Thing looks like a bargain bucket greatest hits compilation of other games on the App Store, but don't let that put you off
Score
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.