Game Reviews

Jelly Cannon Reloaded

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iOS
| Jelly Cannon Reloaded
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Jelly Cannon Reloaded
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iOS
| Jelly Cannon Reloaded

If you close your eyes and jab your finger at the App Store, it's a fair bet that you'll end up poking something that closely resembles Jelly Cannon Reloaded.

If there's one genre that's well and truly reached saturation point on iOS, it's the physics-puzzler. That means Jelly Cannon Reloaded has its work cut out if it wants to impress.

Things start off well, with a dollop of narrative whimsy introducing the basics of the game. Your ultimate goal in each stage is to reunite the glowing orange Sunjelly pieces dotted around the environment, firing cannon ball-like Blurblings to nudge them into place.

A bit of a fling

A prod of your finger is all it takes to interact with the world: a single tap fires a shot, and the position of your finger relative to your cannon affects trajectory and speed. It's a basic mechanic that combines the best bits of Ragdoll Blaster and Angry Birds, marrying them to some smart level design.

Indeed, as the game progresses, its stage design reaches ever more devious heights. There are bottomless depths to avoid, platforms to realign, ropes to swing, glass ledges to shatter, and plenty more - with later levels demanding exacting cannon ball-placement and a fair amount of strategic thinking to unravel each labyrinthine conundrum.

Served up with style

With so much to focus on, Jelly Cannon Reloaded proves both pleasingly varied and surprisingly challenging at times - which should please puzzle aficionados no end. It's a pretty generous package, too, with over 75 levels to tackle, making it a bit of a bargain.

Unfortunately, while it's certainly slick and engaging, the familiarity of Jelly Cannon Reloaded's action is hard to ignore. By now, we've seen the game's core mechanics spun out into endless, intrinsically similar variants and there's just nothing here to surprise.

Yes, it's fun and smartly designed, but something a little less forgettable wouldn't go amiss.

Jelly Cannon Reloaded

A well-designed, entertaining take on an excessively familiar formula that's simply too predictable to truly dazzle
Score
Matt Wales
Matt Wales
Following a lifetime of adventure on the high seas, swabbing the editorial decks of the good ship IGN and singing freelance shanties across far-flung corners of the gaming press, Matt hung up his pirate hat and turned his surf-seared gaze toward the murky mysteries of the handheld gaming world. He lives to sound the siren on the best mobile games out there, and he can't wait to get kraken.