Review: Fragger
Score:
87%
It might have a lot of graphics and story panels behind it, but pull away the armour, and Fragger is another "throw things to kill things" game. It's done extremely well, it's challenging and has longevity built in. And one more important thing to remember as I review it. This is not Angry Birds.
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Do remember this, because after a few levels of playing Fragger, I thought the opposite. On reading the colour text on the Ovi Store, my mind was expecting a "patience/solitaire" version of Worms, with grenades being thrown around by your soldier trying to take out other soldiers.
In a way it is, but after playing for a bit, the mighty eagle in the room popped up and I started to think this was a bad cover of Angry Birds. I was selecting the strength and launch angle of grenades, they were bouncing round the landscape, and exploding after a set time. Oh and you got up to three medals depending on how skilfully you completed the level.
But keep playing and you find that while there are similarities, they're in the eye of the beholder. Lots of games structure their rewards this way; throwing things into the sky has been the staple of many games; rolling balls around a landscape with physics isn't unique; and the graphics look to be an update from Green Beret.
Right there is probably the key component of the game - because the grenades bounce around the landscape - where birds just crash and stop, grenades are much more susceptible to rolling around the levels, and with a long fuse you're going to need to think carefully (or experiment a lot).
As you'd expect, you have a very basic tutorial taking you through the first few levels, showing you how to change the angle of your throw and the strength you put behind it. Basically you hold your finger down and slide it up and down the landscape orientated screen for the angle, with left and right to alter the power. It's a very simple system and, while it has echoes of the old cursor key controls in games like Scorched Earth, it makes for a much more gentle and accessible game.
My only complaint about this is when you need to make a tiny change to your throw - it's very hard to make a small change. Part of me wishes the cursor keys on my E7 could return to gaming duty, but alas no. There are times when you need to get a grenade into a very small space, be it a manhole leading into a cave, down the side of a skyscraper, or a delicate roll towards the edge of the screen so it explodes without rolling off to the right (where the grenades are lost).
While I know it fits in with the game mechanics and level design, I do wonder why you can't run around the screen or die from the explosions - the grenades I'm used to don't have a hero shield built into the casing. No matter, it doesn't change the puzzle aspect of the game. You might think that you can't do much, but as you progress you get hatches that need to be blown out before you can get to hidden enemies, crates of TNT to magnify explosions, tunnels you need to bounce your grenade around to get under the floorboards of a building.
It's all realistic, but compressed into a single screen of action, and there's a huge amount of value in Fragger, with over 300 levels to play through, spread over 6 different worlds, which have different structures and looks, but essentially the same basic idea.
Fragger is horribly addictive, though the accuracy required to play means that it is an order of magnitude less forgiving than Angry Birds. Balancing that out, you get far more grenades than you need - with four enemies you might get nine grenades, for example. Take those two together and you have a difficulty level that's comparable to the feathered friends that you likely have on your phone already. Oh and those medals? There's still a need, somewhere in my gaming body, to make sure I get three medals for a "perfect" level completion.
Add in clear graphics with no frame rate lag or slowdown, crisp sound effects for the explosions, death and destruction, and you have a mobile game that has a clear vision, is easy to play, and provides a huge amount of playing time. What's not to like?
-- Ewan Spence, July 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at