XBLIG Review: Flycatcher

“Looks Can Be Deceiving, and This One is WELL Worth The Look.”

An XboxHornet Review By Liam Jugler.

Flycatcher is basically the “Worms Ninja-Rope” in a full game and it rocks so hard that someone made a full game based on that awesome mechanic. This is what I’m talking about fellas. Everyone has played Worms, and everyone who played Worms knew the ninjarope was the best thing about that game (Side note, the reason for this is probably due to it being the most wild display of physics for the time. At the time we didn’t have Half-Life 2 Gravity guns in every game, so being able to swing around a world in vaguely realistic way was intense) . The core mechanic at work here is a tweaked version of what I just discussed, where the object is to swing your rope through groups of flies to get points.

Flycatcher does this pretty damned well. The mechanic is easy to understand, yet hard to master. It feels satisfying when you start to pull of complex, interesting jumps and swings and some of the stages facilitate this learning curve in truly wonderful ways. Many of the earlier stages seem to have areas that are begging you “Hey, dude, bet you can’t do this’. The game continues giving you tips and ideas through little signposts for a good spell. A good idea was making these optional. A lot of gamers (like myself, for instance) prefer finding their way around the systems of the game themselves and no one likes mashing past a couple big ugly boxes at the start of a game.

So where does Flycatcher go wrong? Well, gameplay-wise? Not very much, really. I really enjoyed what I played with my main gripe being your walking speed and jump height is far too low. The whole game encourages swift, quick movement and is indeed built on that concept (the quicker you catch flies, the more your multiplier builds, wonderfully represented by a sun that gets bigger and more psychedelic the higher your multiplier) so it seems pretty counter intuitive to have your character be so slow at recovering after a fall or mistimed swing.

Look at any other game that encourages any one particular virtue, be it speed or cool combat or whatever, and you’ll notice that all of the best of them make recovering from mistakes incredibly quick and easier to do. Whenever you screw up your combo in Godhand, it’s a case of hopping back and starting again, when you die in Dark Souls, you get back up, when you stop in Sonic, you get back up to speed in a few seconds. You can see my point here. It’s a really really minor issue but it did make me worry every time I did a jump and frustrated me every time I had to slowly crawl back into position.  The same thing carries over into the way that the rope reacts against walls. In Worms, the rope was a physics item that could wrap around surfaces and so on. In here it’s a web that sticks to and essentially depletes when it hits a part of the level. I understand the need to make it different but I don’t really think this works too well.

In the end, Flycatcher is pretty danged fun with a unique traveling system and fun scoring mechanic with a fantastic combo-indication graphic. I say give this one a go, if only to relive those xXNINJAROPEONLYXx maps in Worms 2 Online.

Game Score: 9/10.

Download a free demo of the game here.