Swing Mania

When I was a kid, my sister and I used to have a game where we’d jump off our swing and try to get as close to a certain point on the ground as we could. It wasn’t a massively skilful game, but it was never less than thrilling.

Swing Mania on Android follows a similar principle – you swing out, let go at the appropriate moment and attempt to land in the centre of a target. It too doesn’t require much skill, but the key difference here is that it’s intensely dull.

Swing low, sweet idiot

The demands placed on you are slight. As the charmless central character Shikari Shambu swings out automatically, all you do is tap the screen to let go. Physics – or at least the game’s clunky version of it – does the rest.

These physics are played with in an attempt to try and spice things up – for example, the gravity might turn to a mild variety – but as all this does is change the timing of your overly simplistic button press, it really doesn’t add a lot to the experience.

The game also throws oddly chosen objects in your path, such as the solid block that needs to be swung into three times to break through. As this requires absolutely no input on your part, its implementation is a complete waste of time.

Rough landing

Landing on each target offers up varying points, although this seems to be a bit of a lottery at times. Your character’s feet may appear to be in one point-scoring zone, only to be told he’s landed in a different one, sapping what little sense of achievement you might have felt.

To top it all off, it’s all rendered in a slightly odd, charmless fashion. The graphics are ugly, with a bland lead character and some samey backgrounds, and the animation is laughably basic.

Swing Mania may just have attained average status had it been released in the early days of the Android Market. Today, with increasing numbers of ambitious and fully formed titles making their way to the platform, this severely limited and half-baked attempt doesn’t even scrape into that category.