Game Reviews

Ragdoll Blaster 2

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| Ragdoll Blaster 2
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Ragdoll Blaster 2
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| Ragdoll Blaster 2

It's amazing how long ten months has been in the maturing iPhone games market.

In May 2009, the original Ragdoll Blaster came out - a great, sketchy, hand drawn game in which you controlled the movement of a cannon to fire ragdoll figures at a target, within increasingly complex physically-modelled worlds.

Your prescribed goal was to use as few ragdolls as possible to hit each target, but really your goal was to have some fairly mindless fun. And it all worked brilliantly, with over a hundred levels released and many millions of games downloaded.

To that extent, Ragdoll Blaster was the right game at the right time. Indeed, it could be said to have lit the fuse on an explosion of ragdoll games.

So can the cannon hit the target for a second time?

Plenty of gunpowder

The first thing to emphasise is Ragdoll Blaster 2 delivers everything you'd expect from a sequel.

It's bigger: now with 150 levels. It's better: at least in terms of general presentation, graphics and audio. There's more complexity in the gravity effects, teleporters, switches, and other various mechanical contraptions you have to deal with.

The ragdolls even talk and moan as you fire them into boxes, bombs, springs, and wheels.

The game also feels much more solid, particularly in terms of the user interface, options, and integration with the Plus+ social gaming network, which is used for awards and leaderboards.

However, as much as I enjoy it I'm not sure it has the immediacy of the original.

First impressions

Of course, it can't have. It's a sequel.

Equally, the whole App Store has moved on in the past ten months. All iPhone games are more polished, but even taking that into account, Ragdoll Blaster 2 doesn't have that freshness.

Now, I hasten to point out that this doesn't mean it's any less enjoyable. You're operating in a more coherent world, and one that maintains Ragdoll Blaster's immediacy as well as its one-more-go-ability.

Some levels remain capricious in terms of how you solve them, but this is less striking than before and there's a delicious feeling of wanting to rush through all 150, mixed with the desire to savour them.

Flailing

Neatly, you can also easily compare your scores - they're organised into metal-themed rooms, such as Tin, Nickel, and Brass - with other players via Plus+. This encourages replay in order to get your number of fired ragdolls as low as possible.

Equally, I'd expect Ragdoll Blaster 2 to sell by the App Store-load too. It's already in the US top 10 and will no doubt stay there for months.

Maybe I'm just shedding a tear for something that's long lost, even if it was ever there. In that context, Ragdoll Blaster 2 is a really good game: bigger and better, but also fundamentally more of the same.

Ragdoll Blaster 2

Ragdoll Blaster 2 is everything you'd expect from a sequel to a million-selling game, although it doesn't quite have the immediacy of the original
Score
Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.