Game Reviews

RETRY

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RETRY
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"COME ON YA WINGED BASTARD!"

"GET UP THERE YOU PLANEY F**K!"

"That's IT... I give up."

"Okay one more gHOW DID I HIT THAT? HOW did I hit THAT?"

The above is just a small selection of phrases to spew forth from my mouth over the course of my time with RETRY - the nasty, vindictive, brilliant debut effort from Rovio LVL 11.

Again

RETRY looks like the best NES game never made, but beneath its retro look, behind the fluffy white clouds and deep blue skies, is the game the Marquis de Sade would make if he were alive today and a certified iOS developer.

You control a plane and need to fly through an environment to reach an airstrip while avoiding hazards.

You might have to contend with rain lashing down, or wind pushing against you, or a steep hill climb, or a rock poking out of the ground at an inconvenient location - whatever it is, you need to deal with it.

You always feel in control with RETRY, and that's crucial. When you tap the screen you climb in altitude and accelerate forward at the same time. And though this is the only input you have to manoeuvre, it's consistent and immediate, and you always know that each crash was your fault.

Crashing is constant. Each place you wreck a little ghost of a plane remains, until on some levels where you've spent 20 minutes on the same area and a tricky obstacle looks like fly paper for aircraft.

One more go...

There's a huge relief when you complete a stage, but until you do REtry constantly taunts and ribs you. Three star ratings on each level are theoretically possible, but you'll scratch your head wondering exactly how that might be the case.

The same goes for certain coins dotted around the stage that seem totally out of reach.

When you smash into the ground, a little graphic shows you how achingly close you were to the end of the stage.

When you reset a world after hitting the retry button, you return to your starting position but the world doesn't, so that moving pillar you got past easily last time may now be blocking your path.

Even the free to play elements fit in with this theme of difficulty, and in a masochistic sort of way the game is better for being a freemium release.

I loathe every little bit of RETRY for all the right reasons. And because of that you should go and download it immediately. Well go on then.

RETRY

Unforgiving, relentless, soul-crushing, precise, gorgeous, addictive, fantastic - RETRY is all these things, go get it
Score
Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.