A year after the devastation of the BP oil spill, is it wise to release a physics-based oil transportation puzzle title? Probably not, but it sure is fun.
When you’re Chillingo, publishers of iOS-conquering app blockbusters such as Angry Birds and Cut the Rope, you can literally attach your name to any game you like, knowing full well that you have earned a loyal following with 79c to spare.
Thankfully, the Finnish app maestros aren’t known for lazily relying on their established franchises (*cough* aside from Angry Birds Rio…) and thus we at JOE have to doff our caps in their direction for developer Holy Water Games’ Feed Me Oil.
After all, who says that you can’t make light of potentially devastating oil spills a year after the BP’s mess at Deepwater Horizon? Everyone says that actually, but thankfully Chillingo went ahead and made the game anyway.
Currently feeding an army of addicted players at the top of the worldwide iOS charts, Feed Me Oil is another sterling physics-based effort that tasks users with feeding oil from a broken pipe to the mouths of the game’s increasingly odd creatures.
Yes, as you can tell below, these guys basically resemble land masses with googly eyes and may have actually been a last-ditch effort to help sell the game’s unusual subject matter to the masses. In Chillingo’s defence, however, they somehow help to achieve an odd charm and personality that punctuates the surreal art style throughout.
Anytime you’re staring at the screen in bemusement, we recommend you just go with it
Each level begins with a leaky pipe (activated with a quick touch) and a number of objects, ranging from platforms to fans, that will eventually guide your oil stream towards the gaping mouth of whichever ridiculous character Holy Water Games have devised. The correct placing of your objects is helped by an on-screen hints system that can be accessed when you inevitably become stuck and displays transparent indicators of correct steps.
In practice, the physics of Feed Me Oil are hypnotic from the offset, while we at JOE wasted far too much time in our first playthroughs simply by lining up platforms in whichever positions we fancied and gazing at the possibilities of misguided oil transportation.
Well-hidden hints
The difficulty of Feed Me Oil is sure to be the most controversial aspect of the entire game. While initially the game’s levels can be a breeze, we’ll admit that we still had to use a few hints to clear the first.
Imagine our shock then, when we discovered that to access hints from the first world onwards, we had to fork out the same price as the game itself to continue using the clues and unlock the option that we had previously been using free of charge.
That’s like charging Super Mario every title he wants a mushroom item and it iss moves like this that are causing us to look at the mobile arena’s increasing moves towards quasi-free-to-play options with beleaguered hesitation.
Unlike Cut the Rope, we found that the principal fault of Feed Me Oil (despite the greedy hint charging) is that the player’s creativity is rarely rewarded. By using the hints, one quickly realised that the puzzle solutions are quite rigid and exact in nature – never offering more than one precise solution to the level. Is this a deliberate gameplay mechanic, especially considering that players must pay for help in later puzzles? We wouldn’t be surprised.
Considering it’s so charming, irreverent and its clever use of iOS’ core functionality, it’s no surprise that Feed Me Oil is currently burning up app charts across the world, though the game’s cleverly-hidden darker side has us a little reluctant to fully recommend the title to undecided players.
With presentation as slick as its title suggests, however, the core gameplay and ‘one more go’ replayability of the game has ensured that our initial rage has spilled over into a grudging respect and admiration for the efforts of Holy Water Games. Despite our reservations for some of the app’s practices, it must be said that it’s still one of the finest physics-based puzzle titles around.
Feed Me Oil is available on Apple iOS devices for 79c.
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