Hands-on with Sprinkle follow-up Sprinkle Islands

We recently managed to get an exclusive first look at Sprinkle Islands, the upcoming sequel to 2011's Silver Award-winning puzzler Sprinkle.

Building on the foundations of the original game, Sprinkle Islands adds a few gameplay tweaks and fancy graphical effects, utilising the graphics engine developed for studio stablemate Granny Smith.

Mediocre co-founder Henrik Johansson was keen to show off the, admittedly lovely, sea effects as he described one of the key gameplay changes - the transitions between and across islands on boats and other vehicles.

Although this promises to make the levels larger and longer, allowing for more complex puzzles, Johansson stressed that Mediocre has attempted to balance this out by making the basic gameplay easier.

This is partly down to the controls. In Sprinkle it was necessary to manipulate the height and orientation of the hose, which could sometimes be fiddly. Sprinkle Islands handles the finer controls automatically, leaving you to concentrate on solving the puzzles.

As you might expect, Islands will be bigger than its predecessor, spanning four worlds initially with 12 levels in each. Mediocre also claims that there will be two significant updates soon after the game's launch.

Somewhat inevitably, IAPs are also set to make an appearance, but as Sprinkle Islands is a paid game these will be limited to unlocking stages early and making cosmetic changes.

Another new inclusion is boss characters. During our hands-on time we came up against a malevolent octopus that required several blows to defeat at the same time as we had to extinguish fires. This encounter made for a welcome change of pace and brought a sense of completion to that series of stages.
Sprinkle Islands is shaping up to be a bigger, friendlier, prettier, and - appropriately enough - more fluid game than Sprinkle. From what we've seen it looks like a solid sequel. You'll have to wait till its June launch on iOS and Android to see for yourself.