Posted by Ryan Johnson on 09 14, 2010

WINDiT

Categories: Games, | 0 comments | |

Fill up the bathtub, toss in some toys, and let the rubber ducky loose! WINDiT, a new game from Flambe Studios, is a dodge and destroy game where you navigate rubber duckies and other childhood bathtub toys around in water obstacles to collect life savers for health and life rafts with invisible survivors in them. Each level requires you to capture a certain number of life rafts to advance. Grab them as quickly as you can while avoiding damage and you’ll see yourself in the winners circle in no time.

WINDiT is tailored with children in mind, but meant for people of all ages to play. To collect life rafts and health you need to tilt your iPhone/iPod touch/iPad. Tilting forward slows you down, tilting back speeds you up, and side-to-side glides you laterally across the water. Littered in the water ahead are a multitude of obstacles. Big and little buoys, unpredictable ships, runaway beach balls, and more cloud the way and make collecting health and life rafts difficult. You’ve got a powerful cannon that can blast these items to oblivion, but it takes precision shooting to adequately eliminate your targets. Firing the cannon aimlessly isn’t advised because not only does it eliminate obstacles, but it eliminates life rafts and health too. Another defense mechanism at your disposal is hurricane winds. If you blow into the speaker it’ll clear it’ll whipe out everything on the playing surface. This feature is cool, but it’s a bit awkward to invoke so you take a bit of a risk each time you try to use it.

In this game you can choose from a variety of toys to use such as a rubber ducky, toy boat, paper boat, wooden raft, pirate, ship, aircraft carrier. Each one has different advantages and disadvantages from the next. My personal favorite is the pirate ship because it’s smaller, sleeker, and fits through small windows. There are 3 different levels (bathtub, ocean, and river), each one significantly more challenging than the next, offering 7 missions a piece. Personally I was able to get through the first 7 missions in just a few tries, but after that it got trickier. I think the biggest key is getting the feel for moving laterally. It takes some getting used to because the toys don’t move with perfect precision, they sort of meander from side to side and slide a little further than you might want. You can tweak the sensitivity in the settings section so you can get it just right for your taste.

I found WINDiT to be pretty challenging. It takes some getting used to at first, but once you’ve got the hang of maneuvering and firing the cannong you’ll be able to get pretty far. Once you get about 7 missions deep the importance of being able to properly gauge the speed of play is critical. Earlier stages you can just move left-to-right and get by with minimal damage, however as the levels get harder you need to be able to speed up and slow down play (forward and backward tilt) while you swerve left-to-right, because obstacles coming toward you also move very quickly laterally. You’ll take on a ton of damage consecutively if you don’t maximize all aspects of the games controls.

Overall I found WINDiT to be an okay game. For whatever reason I didn’t find it to be particularly fun. I like the childish theme, in fact that’s what drew me to the game, but the fun factor just wasn’t there for me. I can safely say that the quality of the overall game, the challenge it presents, and the number of levels and options it has certainly makes it worth its $0.99 price point, however due to the lack of fun factor I think it’s a game that some will like and others will find kind of boring. I myself plowed through 8 levels and instead of feeling a relentless desire to keep playing I more or less felt like I’d had enough. I’m not sure exactly what to suggest that would make it more fun, but I definitely felt the fun factor was lacking. Given the bathtub and rubber ducky theme I’d say WINDiT is probably a decent game for kids. The theme should register well with youngsters, but I’d say anyone under the age of 10 probably won’t get very far in the game.

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