Game Reviews

SpillPills

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SpillPills
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SpillPills possesses the same throwaway addictiveness that popping bubble wrap does and, sadly, the same depth.

The game revolves around trafficking little coloured pills which appear sporadically behind gates. Tapping the gates releases the pills, whereupon they automatically track a path toward a corresponding coloured goal.

Timing is key, in that you need to make sure that no pill waits behind a gate for too long, lest it expires - but, you also need to ensure traveling pills don’t collide with one another. There are various much smaller pills that skitter about the play area, some of which net point bonuses when collided with and some of which, such as the black pill, relieve you of another life.

As the game progresses, the speed at which the pills travel increases, as does the speed at which they arrive behind the gates. In the later stages there are more colours introduced too, making for an even busier play area.

In Career mode, the aim is to send a quota of pills successfully to their goal, whereas Survival mode has you funneling pills relentlessly until your lives finally run dry.

The ingredients are there: it’s original, oddly satisfying, and could be tweaked almost endlessly into new and interesting forms. The sad thing about SpillPills is that with a bit of tidying up and finessing, the concept could carry a genre in its own right.

As it is, however, the gameplay is too easy and repetitive - even in Hard mode - to offer anything beyond a shallow challenge.

Similarly, the control set-up allows for more complex input than the game ever demands. There is never really any great necessity to keep gates open for multiple travelling pills, at least not in the game’s first hour, which is already long enough for it to have expunged its allure.

The graphics are cheerfully detailed and the music, though a tad incidental, rises above the game’s otherwise satisfactory presentation. Yet, its not enough to rescue the experience from feeling only half-realised. Perhaps a sequel will do the genuinely original gameplay offered here more justice.

SpillPills

SpillPills lays promising foundations for a pleasant puzzle treatment, but fails to comprehend the scope of its own innovation and palls quickly as a result
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