Game Reviews

Magic Wingdom

Star onStar onStar halfStar offStar off
|
| Magic Wingdom
Get
Magic Wingdom
|
| Magic Wingdom

Magic Wingdom creates the impression that PlayCreek was developing two different bird-themed freemium titles at the same time, realised that neither had the gameplay feathers to soar up the charts, and half-heartedly stitched them together in the hope that the combination might be a winner.

Unsurprisingly, the fumbled matching of a simple line-drawing arcade title with drearily dull farmyard management title makes for jumbled mess to play that's only briefly entertaining.

Egg rolls

The main gaming part of Magic Wingdom involves the traditionally Easter-themed sport of egg rolling.

Basically, different coloured and patterned eggs are rolling steadily into the centre of the screen at an ever-increasing pace and it's your job to match them up with your finely honed line-drawing skills.

Using your most accurate digit, you trace a direct path between identical eggs - either in pairs or longer chains, which earn you bonus Gold to spend later. The tricky part is that it's Game Over if two non-matching eggs collide, so you need to balance the risk of pushing for lengthy chains against playing it safe and surviving longer.

The screen soon fills up with rolling ovulations, so it's handy that the touchscreen controls work so intuitively and the collision detection is spot-on. Unfortunately, despite some early addictive appeal, the lack of variation beyond occasional screen-clearing power-ups means your enthusiasm soon wears thinner than a Little Chef omelette.

The yolk's on you

There are three different arenas to unlock, but they’re practically identical and only ramp up the difficulty a tad.

What's more irksome is the pain you have to go through to even see them. Unless you're prepared to just fork out an in-app purchase for each one, you have to grind through a weak farmyard mini-game before entry is permitted.

Across four near identical fields, you use gold earned in-game - or bought in IAP bundles - to buy barely animated birds, equipment, and decorations in order to fill-up a range of stat meters.

The game gives you unsubtle hints about what farmyard items work well together, and will give you a stats boost, yet they nearly all rely on either buying pots of gold or endlessly rolling eggs to earn a tiny handful of coins.

Ultimately, Magic Wingdom is a rather drawn-out, pointless affair and the most fun you'll get is from the first - totally free - egg rolling mini-game anyway.

Magic Wingdom

A rather clumsy mash-up of line drawing and farmyard drudgery, Magic Wingdom is worth five minutes of free egg-rolling arcade play, but none of your real cash
Score
Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo