Roadkill Cafe: Yeeehaw! Come and get it!
Written: Oct 14 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: five minigames, cheap, lots of control options, great style, fun, online scoreboards
Cons: moving virtual stick
The Bottom Line: One of the best iPhone games out there.
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| kjell1979's Full Review: Roadkill Cafe for iPhone |
I can't say enough for the promotional price drops on the iTunes App Store. Games that are normally a buck or two can appear for free. Yes many of these games are pretty pedestrian or even terrible, but every so often you'll find a great game that is under priced even at its normal sale price. RoadKill Cafe is a game that fits that mold.
Gameplay
Roadkill Cafe is a collection of 5 different games each with their own set of goals.
Cafe
Cafe is the featured game as part of Roadkill Cafe. The goal is to wait for animals to to get hit in the road, then scoop them up and deliver them to the cafe. Problems arise from two fronts. First you have to avoid cars when scooping up roadkill on the highway. Second, you must deliver the "food" (a.k.a. roadkill) to the cafe in a timely manner. If you don't your customers will get mad and you'll lose stars. Once you reach 5 stars, you go on to the next level. However, when you lose 3 of your lives to becoming roadkill yourself, the game ends.
Cafe mode has six different stages and three different difficulty levels. Each new stage is unlocked after finishing the previous level. Later levels offer multiple highway lanes and thus a greater challenge. Higher difficulty levels offer more traffic and thus more of a hazard to your person.
Arcade
Arcade mode is like cafe mode only you stay on one stage indefinitely. Your goal is to serve as many customers as possible while keeping your 5 star rating. The game still ends when you lose 3 of your lives, but the goal is to score as many points as possible on a single level.
Vengeance
Vengeance mode is where the would-be roadkill attempts to get revenge on you. You're free to roam around a field free of traffic. The problem is chickens start appearing one by one from around the screen. The good thing is a rhino occasionally appears to help thin out the chicken population. However the rhino can be your undoing as well because getting trampled by it will end the game for you. The game also ends if you're caught by a chicken. Your score is based on how long you can avoid the chickens. Additional time is added when you scoop up chickens flattened by the rhino.
Rampage
Rampage is the one game where you aren't the wheelbarrow toting collector. Instead you're driving a car down a road filled with traffic and the occasional critter. The goal is to squish as many critters as possible while trying to avoid other cars. You get more points for the more creatures that get squished. You get 100 points for squishing a critter with your tiny car and 20 points if another car on the road gets one. Thus if you focus on avoiding traffic, you can still rack up a ton of points, just not as fast as when you're actively go after the critters on the road.
Survival
Survival mode is one of my favorites in this set. This mode places you squarely in the middle of 13 lanes of traffic spanning the entire length of the screen. There is no escape; you simply must avoid getting hit by the various cars traveling across the screen. Your score is simply the time it takes for you to get hit. Thus the longer you can last the higher your time is. There are no bonuses, it's pure survival.
Overall the gameplay is fantastic. Each mode has its own identity and set of gameplay mechanics unique to the others (save for cafe and arcade mode). Each game has its own random moments but is balanced in such a way where it rarely if ever puts you in an unfair situation. Yes there are times where in survival mode a few cars travel at you in one set of lanes at the same time, but those are rare and ultimately escapable. Also there are times when the rhino in Vengeance mode appears without warning or time to react, but that's your penalty for traveling too close to the side of the screen. These games might sound easy but they are strangely difficult to master and will ultimately overcome you. This is the perfect recipe for a set of very addictive game.
Controls
One of the best aspects of Roadkill Cafe is that it has several decent control options at your disposal. The default control scheme is the virtual stick. The virtual stick in Roadkill Cafe is a little unique in that if your finger or thumb begins to wander outside the area that the stick covers, the whole stick circle moves with your thumb. In one sense this is good because you're maintaining control over your character, but it's also weird in that the stick can then wander into areas which obscure your vision of oncoming traffic.
Another control scheme is you can touch the place where you want your character to go. He'll then travel a straight line to get there. This is really useful for people who are used to using a mouse to guide characters along like in realtime strategy games and games like Diablo. In the end I found this control scheme to be the least useful because your finger often obscures the action on the screen making it hard to see what's going on and adjust your movements accordingly.
The final control scheme is the tilt action. By tilting your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can cause your character to move in a certain direction. I found this to be the most useful control format, however there are certain situations where it just didn't work. If you're in an unstable environment like a train or car, then it can cause unwanted movements. I also found myself hunched over much more while playing with this control scheme. So while it provides the best controls given the gameplay it's the least ergonomically friendly one too.
Overall given all the control schemes they respond really well. Your character is fairly responsive and can make good adjustments on the fly. The control scheme is really simple in that you just move your guy around the screen so there's no need for excess buttons and controls to remember. Overall it's one of the strongest aspects of the game.
Graphics
The graphics in Roadkill Cafe aren't anything special. The bird's eye perspective causes the detail to suffer due to the small character models. That is, your own character is hard to make out. Is he carrying a wheelbarrow or a large trowel? The cars too lack a lot of detail as well as the critters. In addition, the animations are rather crude in that animals are simply flattened in an instant rather than some gory animation. Despite the small resolution and crude animations, Roadkill Cafe operates at a fairly high framerate such that the action seems smooth and not so choppy as one would expect. So overall while the graphics fail to excel they also succeed in not getting in the way of the action.
Sound
The audio in Roadkill Cafe is one of the best aspects of the game. On the one hand you have the music. The main theme brilliantly fits in with the atmosphere that's achieved in this game. The main theme is a banjo remix that just screams trailer trash and makes me smile whenever I hear it. There's a different more upbeat tune that's of the same hillbilly style that plays during the game. Finally the short one second music clip that plays at the end of the game is woefully out of place in the whole demeanor of the game. Sadly that's the only low point in the audio department.
The sound effects are in a word brilliant. This game is jam-packed full of a diverse set of sound effects all of which fit into the redneck motif of Roadkill Cafe. Each creature has its own sound effect such that you know what's being squished on the pavement. Each car also has its own unique sound effect. And all the while there are neat sound effects mixed in such as the Yeehaw of the customers as they chow down on your tasty roadkill cuisine to the triangle ringing in a "come and get it manner" when you deliver your roadkill to the cafe for the first time. It's clear a lot of thought was put into the sound effects and it's evident and greatly appreciated.
Replay Value
There's a lot of replay value in Roadkill Cafe. Not only are there five unique games within the game, but each one has their own online leaderboard. Each game within Roadkill Cafe will suck up hours of your time as you strive to unlock new stages in the Cafe game, and with online leaderboards you're constantly competing against the best of the best around the world. Now Roadkill Cafe won't amount to a full work week of gaming like a big budget RPG, but for 99 cents you certainly get your money's worth. What's even more amazing is that the style of the game drew me in even more than I had imagined. Maybe I'm strangely hypnotized by hillbilly banjo music or the squishing sounds that skunk makes as it's blasted by the 18 wheeler, but there's something about this game that makes it my game of choice when I need a few minutes to kill.
Overall, Roadkill Cafe is pound for pound one of the best iPhone games you'll find on the iTunes App Store. For some this will be a collection of minigames which will fail to impress. If you're looking for an epic experience while trying to avoid any game in the casual gaming genre, then this isn't for you (but then is the iPhone a good gaming platform for you if that's the case?). For others who can find pure gaming bliss in the simplest of gameplay mechanics will strike gold with Roadkill Cafe. It's a true diamond in the rough among all the garbage game apps out there.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
kjell1979
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Location: Oxford, Mass
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