Game Reviews

Abduction! 2

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Abduction! 2
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| Abduction! 2

Doodle Jump on iPhone managed to charm millions with its simple and addictive jumping gameplay back in 2009, arguably managing to become the first truly break-out hit on the fledgling App Store in the process.

With the game absent from Android, a similar title, Abduction!, appeared on the Android Market.

Rather than just a poor copy of a successful game, however, Abduction! ended up being a genuinely fun experience, securing a Pocket Gamer Bronze Award as a result.

So, how do you go about making a sequel to a simple jumping game?

The bovine is back

The basic gameplay is as engaging as it’s ever been. Your cow (or squirrel, or walrus, or any number of adorable critters) is constantly bouncing, and you have to control the direction of its bounces by tilting the phone.

It’s sharp and responsive, and never leaves you feeling that a fall can be blamed on the controls.

There’s a basic 'how high can you get' never-ending level, a Story mode with a selection of geographically themed levels, and even a Kids mode where the cow can never fall.

On top of that, passing levels in the Story mode gives you coins to spend in the shop depending on how quick you were and how many caged animals you hit on the way up.

Here you can buy new animal avatars on top of the normal cow, and clothing items to match their mood (the walrus in a top hat being my personal fashion concept this time around).

Where’s the beef?

The elephant in the room (alongside the aforementioned cows, squirrels, and walruses) is of course the fact that the game itself is by its very nature repetitive, and no number of slightly different modes can disguise this fact.

This is alleviated somewhat by a cunning high score tracker - visible at the top of the screen - that displays both your current leaderboard position and how far you have to go to pass the next player, making the simple game that bit harder to pull yourself away from.

Like the original, Abduction! 2 looks at first glance like just another Doodle Jump clone, but the Story mode, customisation options, and inch-perfect controls help it break from the herd.

Abduction! 2

An excellent example of taking a simple concept to its most polished and enjoyable conclusion
Score
Alan Martin
Alan Martin
Having left the metropolitan paradise of Derby for the barren wasteland of London, Alan now produces flash games by day and reviews Android ones by night. It's safe to say he's really putting that English Literature degree to good use