Cgrundertow Coco Loco for Iphone Video Game Review

I don’t think I’m breaking news by telling you video games aren’t always the most original form of entertainment. They’re always based on something else or they’re continuing an older one...their names have more numbers than a calculator. So given the choice, I’ll take the original game over Call of Halo: Modern Battlefield 7 almost every time. Those are usually the games that make the biggest impression on me. But at the same time, not every original game is great, not every great game is original...and I really like hot chocolate. So forget that this iPhone game looks a lot like...another iPhone game. While the blueprint is very familiar, the finished product ends up feeling surprisingly distinct. And chocolately. It’s Coco Loco, and dare I say, it’s better than Angry Birds. I say that for more than the attention-grabbing effect of hyperbole. Coco Loco was clearly built from the same concept as the platform-defining Angry Birds, but it makes the concept its own with some very clever additions and refinements. In fact, if Angry Birds is the Super Mario Bros. of the mobile generation in terms of its impact and significance, Coco Loco is like Mario 3. It takes the same ideas and makes them even better. Just released to the App Store, Coco Loco is the debut project from Twiitch, a new studio formed by Blue Tongue and THQ alumni. It’s fitting to learn Coco Loco is born from some of the same minds that worked on a game like de Blob, because the two games do the same thing...take an old idea and infuse it with really inspired ideas. In Coco Loco, you play as a group of living marshmallows who stumble across this wonderful new world of chocolate. Of course, as would any marshmallow, they make merry among the chocolate bars and jump into steaming rivers of cocoa faster than Augustus Gloop. But obviously, this greatly displeases the chocolate gods. Silly story short, you have to save your marshmallow friends from their chocolate kidnappers. And you do this by launching marshmallows, jelly blobs and all manner of friendly confectionaries to attack the ones who aren’t quite so friendly. Like Angry Birds, Coco Loco is a physics-based action puzzler. But from there, the game forges its own ground. Sure, you have to pull back and launch things to rescue other things, but it’s how the game approaches this that makes it so distinct. This is a more ambitious game in terms of its design than Angry Birds ever was. Its 60 levels require more interaction, and their puzzles are smarter and frankly, more diverse. A big reason for that diversity is the game’s use of liquids. You might have to dump steaming vats of hot cocoa on your enemies or slice through massive towers of jelly, and the physics for all these different things are spot-on. The sheer fun factor of the game aside, Coco Loco is perhaps even more stunning because of its liquids. It’s amazing to see these kind of physics and liquid effects running on a phone. But the important thing is what the jellies and jams and cocoa contribute to the gameplay, and ultimately, that’s what makes Coco Loco so delicious. I may prefer originality, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate applying creative muscle to an existing concept. Especially when the end result is one of the best new games in the App Store.