Tiny Wings was definitely an iOS game that I sank a lot of hours into. Like Angry Birds, Tiny Wings was able to take simple mechanics and turn them into addictive gameplay that kept me coming back to the game. It wasn’t just that playing Tiny Wings was enjoyable. It really was that sense of satisfaction after finally completing an objective which, while a simple one, always seemed just out of reach.
At first glance, Sugar High looks a lot like Tiny Wings. It plays a lot like it, too. You play as Biscuit, a sweet-loving dog who craves candy and treats by day, and frolics through a land of delicious delights by night. Your goal is to soar through the level, collecting candy and swatting flies away from your precious sweets.
Each thing you do, whether it’s a perfect slide (Tiny Wings veterans will remember these as great slides), collecting candy, or performing a loop-dee-loop inside an orange, will earn you a speed bonus, accelerating Biscuit. The faster you go the further you’ll go, but the slower you are the more likely you are to run into a giant evil clock. Slow down enough and the giant evil clock will catch up with you and devour you, and Biscuit will wake up from his sweet filled dream and you’ll have to start over.
The art style in Sugar High is pretty impressive. Hand-painted backgrounds really pop on the iPhone’s screen, and Biscuit is adorable. I loved when, in between levels, he’d turn to me with a goofy grin on his face, hyped up on candy and cake.
Level design really sets Sugar High apart from other games in its class. The slides, loops, and dives you’ll perform into oranges, kiwis, and watermelons were really a ton of fun. The speed bonuses also made the game a bit less frustrating to play; because I was able to speed up from collecting candy or doing loop-dee-loops, instead of only from slides or speed coins, I felt like gameplay had much more momentum.
However, once I got the hang of Sugar High and started racking up achievements, I found less and less of a reason to come back to the game. A dozen or so more, difficult objectives to obtain would have really made a difference.
In Conclusion
Sugar High takes everything great about Tiny Wings, slaps on its own story and plays around with the environment a bit. It’s a refreshing change, and brought me back to a type of game I hadn’t revisited in a while. It even elicited some moments of high-pitched girlish giggling and fun, and in my book, Sugar High holds its own against its predecessors. It just needs some more objectives or harder achievements to really sweeten the deal.
