Game Reviews

Kill the Plumber World - I'm still waiting for Super Kill the Plumber Bros World 2

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iOS
| Kill the Plumber
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Kill the Plumber World - I'm still waiting for Super Kill the Plumber Bros World 2
|
iOS
| Kill the Plumber

Kill the Plumber World is a refreshed, polished up, and now App Store-approved version of Kill the Plumber. It's pretty shiny, and it takes the same reverse-Mario look at platforming.

Just, you know, without Mario.

So, instead of playing the hero, you're playing what you might nominally call the villains - disposable little creatures that need to keep the titular plumber (who now looks a lot like Gordon Freeman from Half-Life) from reaching his goal.

Each chunk of levels sees you controlling a different sort of monster. Sometimes to succeed all you have to do is smash into Gordy, other times you need to puzzle out the solution by using multiple suspiciously mushroom-shaped things.

And it all makes for a reasonably entertaining, if slightly wonky experience. There's nothing especially bad about it, but there's nothing especially brilliant either.

So you're trying to kill a generic plumber?

That's pretty much it yeah, although like I say, the plumber doesn't look like Mario so much any more. There are simple controls that enable you to murder the rampaging spanner-hawk at your own pace.

Each different creature has its own set up though. Some can just move left and right, others can jump, and more still are giant frowning blocks that can smash down onto the floor.

To begin with you've only got one monster to move around, but as the game gets more complex you get multiple ones. You control them all at the same time though.

So, for example, you might need to sacrifice a jumper to bounce the plumber high enough that when you blow up one of your bomb-things he's caught in the blast.

The problem is the solutions are so precise that even messing up by a millisecond is going to mean you miss your chance to mete out some retribution.

There's no experimentation either. There's the right way to do things, and there's dull failure and repetition until you find it.

Hmmm, doesn't sound spectacular

It's not. It's an interesting idea, but it never really gets over the idea-hill to the promised land of intriguing gameplay beyond. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, but it all just feels a little flustered and one-note.

There's fun to be had here, but it's not quite the deconstruction of the platform genre that you might be hoping for.

Kill the Plumber World - I'm still waiting for Super Kill the Plumber Bros World 2

There are some interesting ideas here, but the whole thing feels a little too cumbersome to really recommend
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.