Adapting platforming to the iPhone is a tricky buisness – the genre thrives on precision and twitch reaction, but Apple’s unfeeling slab of touchscreen is almost the antithesis of precision and feedback when it comes to some run and jump frolicking. The results of a straight-up port with a faux d-pad are mixed – Sonic the Hedgehog suffers but manages to scrape by on the title’s inherently forgiving nature, but Mega Man II is barely playable.
New frontiers require new adaptation – fish had to grow legs to walk on land, and we’re going to become some kind of creepy cosmo-ghosts when we fly into space, howling like scary astro-specters and rattling our solar-chains. Hook Champ makes that evolutionary leap – like Sonic, the game is all about carrying momentum for visceral thrills and bonus points, and like Mega Man II it’s brutally unforgiving. What makes it work is the mechanic – Hook Champ relies on timed context-sensitive taps to make your avatar swing from ropes, blast ghosts with shotguns or fire rocket boots.
In short, Hook Champ knows what time it is. The style of the thing is really beautiful, drawing consistently on the style of old Japanese home computer games in much the same way indie darling Cave Story did some years back. Courses are short, sweet and nailbiting, the script is sharp and charming and everything from the music to the particle effects hangs together with the kind of consistency retro workouts need to feel “whole”. Yes, there’s a grinding mechanic at the core of the thing, with upgrades required to even have a chance at the later temples. This is pocket gaming, though, and I’m willing to overlook that sort of thing given the dip in, dip out spirit of the genre.
In short, if you buy some half-cocked port of an old NES game over this, I’m going to cast a scary curse on your junk – possibly involving mummies.