XBLIG Review: Very Hungry Pumpkin

Do you have children that you need to keep entertained this October 31st?  Then ‘Very Hungry Pumpkin’ may just be the game for you.  You don’t?  Then you might want to look elsewhere for entertainment…

The games premise is very simple; you play as a/the Hungry Pumpkin on a mission to eat as many sweets as possible before they are snapped up by the mindless trick or treaters that mercilessly patrol the streets.  Personally if I were a trick or treater, even if the evening had turned up a meagre candy harvest I would like to think I wouldn’t resort to eating off the floor and would instead let any animated pumpkin go about his business.

The gameplay is simple at heart, but the difficulty soon ramps up, with the numbers and speed of trick or treaters increasing fairly rapidly.  This is where I have a problem with the game.  It seems on the surface to be aimed at a younger audience, with its colourful art-style, but the difficulty ramps up so fast that I couldn’t see a junior gamer being able to progress past the 2^nd or 3^rd levels.

The Colourful art style that I mentioned deserves a special mention.  All of the characters are pre-rendered, allowing them to display a clean, crisp look which makes it one of the vibrant looking XBLIG that I have played.

‘Very Hungry Pumpkin’ doesn’t have a whole lot of depth, but it will keep you and your offspring entertain for a short while.  Personally I would recommend the IPhone version of this game, as it is identical in feature-set to this console version but it is a platform that is more suited to this sort of game, where it can be played in short bursts.

Advertisement

~ by rusted3572 on October 26, 2009.