In the long list of basic rules of life that your mom probably taught you, I’m sure she included “eat lots of fruit” and “avoid stepping in your own poop”. Well, the Yumsters are back and hoping to help reinforce these valuable life guidelines in KranX Productions’ new game, Tasty Way.
It is up to you to help guide your color-changing Yumster to his food by drawing his path through the fruits of the same color. If you accidentally eat a piece of fruit that is not the same color as the Yumster, then he will not be able to digest it and leave a fresh pile poop behind him. You will need to avoid this when you loop back around and return to this part of the “play area” later. The game plays almost as if you are on a treadmill, with the previous scenery eventually rolling back around, just how you left it.
Your Yumster has the ability to change color, allowing him to eat fruits of a different color. The longer you play, the faster the Yumster gets, and the more difficult it’ll be to eat the correct colored fruit and subsequently to avoid Yumster’s ever-increasing droppings. There are a number of special power ups that can also be collected which can clear the play area, or safely collect his poop. Although disturbingly, this looks a little too much like he’s eating it.
Traditionally when we think of the line-drawing genre, time-managemnet style games like Flight Control or Harbor Master imeediately come to mind, but unlike those, Tasty Way plays like a vertical scrolling arcade game. Almost a little bit like Centipede, except you can’t move backwards. We really liked how your actions in one “round” directly effected the play area in the next. This made for some really dynamic and varied gameplay. Hit the poop w/o the power-up protection and it’s all over!
We found the game to be both fast-paced and fun. Tasty Way does have some interesting local stats, but we would have loved to have seen a global leaderboard, perhaps some OpenFeint support. The visuals in the game are really fun and we especially liked the changing seasons and growing fruit. There is also a funky soundtrack that was fairly enjoyable. We did find that sometimes the path didn’t seem to draw exactly how we wanted, but you can make on-the-fly adjustments and we definitely did have fun despite this minor annoyance. There were some nice eating and pooping sound effects that were tastefully done.
Tasty Way is a fun and creative pickup and play style game and has a nice tutorial to get you up and playing quickly. We could see younger children having loads of fun, making their Yumster eat the wrong color fruit, just to see him/the screen fill up with poop. The game is easily worth its low $0.99 price tag, but if you act quickly, you can actually pick this one up for FREE until November 26th!
About KranX Productions
KranX Productions is award-winning Russian game production company with an emphasis on producing, developing and prototyping commercial game products for modern platforms. Company is known as IGF’2009 winner in “Excellence In Design Award” for “Musaic Box” game and as developers of “Yumsters 2” for iPhone. Founded in 2004 by Andrey “KranK” Kuzmin, the author of PC games such as “Vangers: One for the Road”, “MOBL”, “Spanking Runners”, “Perimeter” and others. KranX Productions is a registered developer for a number of handheld and console platforms.
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