Strap on a shiny shield and prepare for some non stop running, platfroming, more running and fighting with Captain America’s first Android game.
There’s a handful of different takes on platforming game controls for mobiles devices but a totally gesture based system is a new one for me. The controls are mostly very intuitive: swipe up to jump, down to slide and left and right to change direction. These controls take a little while to get used to and you’ll find yourself mistiming a few jumps earlier on because you’re not swiping quickly or long enough. Earlier levels have a lot of hand holding to get you used to the control scheme and give the mighty Captain America the daunting task of jumping over a series of knee high logs as your moves and combos are ever so slowly dished out to you across the levels. When you get near an enemy a combo is triggered depending on how you approach them and you’re given a series of swiping gestures to perform. This combat, while fine at first, becomes quickly monotonous as the fluid platforming sections become interrupted by the same handfuls of combos on the same handful of enemies, fortunately combat can be avoided in a few ways without any consequence.
The speed and motion makes the platforming sections a lot of fun once they become more advanced but they never reach any real degree of difficulty, which steals away any great feeling of accomplishment once an area has been beaten. Even if they’re unchallenging, the areas are still interesting and you’ll be taking different paths through them by smashing through walls, swinging off poles and wall jumping to try to find the five hidden items that are poorly hidden on each level. After a single playthrough I’d uncovered just about all of the hidden items, which unlocked a small collection of costumes and several tiny images of the covers of some Captain America comics.
The graphics in Captain America looks like they’ve been lifted out of a GameLoft game, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Things look technically impressive and everything moves nicely, it’s just rather bland. There’s a lot of running around grey warehouses and you’d be hard pressed to tell any one level from another. I also experienced several times when the game would move from it’s usual high speed pace to a jolty crawl that made it impossible to play, usually these issues can be resolved by disabling background data but not here. As with many of these types of performance issues on Android, your millage may vary.
For a game using a comic book licence it would have been nice to see a lot more comic style cut scenes in the story rather than a good intro and then just unspoken dialog between levels to create an uninteresting story. There is some spoken dialog from Mr America during the levels, but after the same line of dialog is repeated the same time thrice over in a level you’d be wishing you could switch off the spoken track.
Much like a comic book movie, Captain America is a thrill ride with some pieces great action and some moments that you’d rather forget.
Are you a gamer? What games do you play most on your Android device and what else would you like us to review? Leave us your thoughts in the comments below!
