Review: World of Rabbit
Score:
73%
It looks smart, it sounds wonderfully weird, and there's a tiny hint of the old Game and Watch style of play in World of Rabbit. But can this collection of mini-games win over players in the modern smartphone world?
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World of Rabbit is actually three games, and each of them on their own would be the sort of quick Flash-based game you would expect as a website game - a great little distraction, and the sort of thing that could easily go round a group of friends trying to get the high score in a social group. Link together the three types of games, make each "level" a triathlon with slowly increasing difficulty levels, and wrap them up as gaming bundle, and what do you get? Something that's pretty nice!
First up is the "Run" style game, as your Rabbit sprints around the world doing what rabbits do - collecting carrots. Running along a three lane field, you can switch lanes to make sure you grab the carrots. The problem is the robots running towards you, jumping lanes just as quickly as you can (with the touch screen controls), so you'll need reactions and quick fingers to not only avoid crashing into them, but make sure you're in the right lane to grab the carrots.
You can also jump over them, which is fine in the first "orange" group of levels, but as you progress, flying robots will be in the sky, so jumping becomes as much of as a hazard as the ground.
The cutely named "dance" is next, but this is nowhere near cute. Your job is to defend the rabbit with your Hollywood machine gun (i.e. it never runs out of bullets). The job is simple in this fixed screen stage - just shoot everything that is getting close to your rabbit by tapping on the screen (and "bang!" goes the gun). Again, a great difficulty curve here, as giant robots sneak in from the side, with flying robots lancing towards you, and impossibly big mecha-robots set on killing your rabbit, simply for the crime of not being a robot.
Finally in the triumvirate, is the puzzle section, where you have a scene to reassemble by swapping over a pair of tiles at a time. As with the other games, the longer you play it through, the more complicated the puzzle section, here giving you more puzzle tiles to swap around as you go deeper into the game. There is a timer counting up, but with a little bit less pressure than the other two games.
There's a certain mid nineties zany cartoon look to the game, and while the graphics are mostly big black blobs, they are well defined and always clear. If you have arachnophobia, you'll realise that they are very clear once the big robot spiders start attacking. Just to keep things fresh, you have the chance to customise the look of your rabbit as you play in the "transformigator" section of your burrow, changing the style of your ears, eyes and mouth.
World of Rabbit has a great look, but at the same time it's very much a collection of short games that can be played in quiet moments. Tie them all together with levels that keep the challenge high as you continue to play, and you have a successful game. While not an A-List game, there's nothing that should stop you having a look at the rabbits here.
-- Ewan Spence, July 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at