Cell HD

Gaming is rarely about revolution any more. Instead, developers innovate, improve, or refine earlier games.

Angry Birds and Tilt to Live are effectively Crush the Castle and Robotron at heart, but saying they are merely copies of those games would be to ignore all the refinements they bring to the table.

Cell HD, on the other hand, isn't innovative and doesn’t improve or build upon earlier experiences. Instead, it’s just a straight-up clone that strips the fun from its inspiration rather than evolving the formula.

Cell HD is a familiar concept. You play a cell tasked with eating as many orange bits of food as possible while beating up smaller cells and avoiding bigger ones. As you consume, so you grow. Ring any bells?

Yes, it’s Osmos again. Only it’s not, because growing the cell doesn’t appear to have any visible effect other than to make it larger.

At certain points, Cell HD arbitrarily decides you’ve grown enough, throws two upgrade options your way (both of which are useless), and starts a new level. This new level effectively puts you back to square one, with everything dwarfing your cell and making the whole affair feel utterly pointless and unrewarding.

Eating other creatures isn’t a wise idea anyway - even if you can find one smaller than yourself - thanks to unsatisfying gameplay mechanics.

Instead of organically absorbing your chosen victim, your cell-with-eyes grinds against them, causing both its and your target’s health bars to deplete until one runs out of juice. They rarely end up actually dropping any food in any case, and merely end up acting as obstacles no matter the size.

While there are bigger and smaller organisms floating around, there’s a crushing lack of scale about the game: the camera can’t be zoomed out to view the play area and it all feels like cells are being drawn just slightly off-screen, on the fly.

Stripped of scale, progression, and any semblance of cell-like gameplay, Cell HD ends up playing like a boring game of minimalist Pac-Man, with you swiping your cell around the black and featureless screen looking for the odd orange pill to eat.

There’s a vague scoring system, which appears to be based on a random number generated when you run over a red dot, but no leaderboards or anything of the sort.

There’s also nothing in the way of structure to the gameplay - you just start the game and move up the "levels", feeling mildly disappointed and wishing you were doing something else instead.

It’s like Kosabi Games took a syringe to the Osmos cell, extracted the DNA, drew of a picture of it in crayon, and based the game on that. It’s not evolution - it’s regression.