The Top Hat Club ($0.99) is a nostalgic little sport in some methods. It’s a platformer with (largely) single-screen phases which have mild puzzle parts. It’s tailored from a browser sport. It provides you the entire sport for an reasonably priced, easy up-front value. It carries no grand message, and makes use of a clear however distinct visible fashion. Oh, and you need to use contact controls. It appears like one thing that we’d have seen pop up ten years in the past and brought with no consideration, however maybe right here and now it’s one thing we are able to admire extra.
So sure, The Top Hat Club. A flowery place. Too fancy for the likes of you and me. But our little protagonist has a dream, and that dream is to sidle as much as that fancy bar and sip some fancy wine with some fancy gents. The downside is that you could’t even set foot within the door with out assembly the gown code, and which means you’ve acquired to have a high hat. It’s proper within the title and all the things. Fortunately, high hats appear to simply be laying round. All you need to do is don the hat and head for the door. So lengthy as you’ve gotten the hat, they must allow you to go inside… proper?
Well, anyway. The objective in a lot of the sport’s thirty-plus phases is to select up the hat from wherever within the stage it’s positioned after which make your option to the door. It sounds straightforward, and typically it’s. The trick is that in case you hit your head or in any other case disturb the hat, it can fall off. And wouldn’t you already know it, the phases usually have obstacles that may knock that hat clear off your head in case you don’t method issues rigorously. So you should ensure you’ve deliberate a route that may take you to the exit with out dropping the hat. You actually do must plan too, as most of the phases embody disappearing platforms or different momentary parts that make it as a way to solely have one crack at it.
You have limitless lives, after all. It could be gauche today in case you didn’t. Annoyingly, everytime you die, lose your hat, or fail the stage for another cause, a Game Over menu will pop up. You’ll must manually hit that restart possibility every time, which is a design selection that runs towards the present grain in a approach I don’t actually look after. I haven’t talked about it but, however every stage additionally has 5 cash to attempt to acquire. Getting to the exit in a lot of the phases is a comparatively easy affair, however getting the cash requires eye for the route it is best to take and exact execution. You will most likely fail lots, and having to hammer that restart as an alternative of immediately respawning will get agitating.
My different bones to select with this sport come from the controls. First of all, you need to use the contact controls. No controller help proper now and I see no indications of it being deliberate. That isn’t the tip of the world, however in case you’re going to have a cellular platformer that makes use of contact controls with digital buttons as the one technique of enter, you need to make lifeless sure these controls are spot-on. Regrettably, I discovered these ones to be a bit missing. The sport would typically miss inputs on the digital buttons, and that proved to be deadly in some phases. The mixture of this subject and the dearth of an computerized restart had me crawling the partitions at instances.
I suppose it speaks to the standard of the sport itself that I used to be prepared to persevere via these points irrespective of how livid I acquired. The stage designs listed below are fairly good, with a pleasant stability of puzzles and platforming challenges to maintain you in your toes. It seeds in some new gimmicks alongside the way in which to freshen issues up, and there are some sudden twists in sure ranges that drive you to use the abilities you’ve realized in new methods. It’s not a very lengthy sport on the entire, nevertheless it doesn’t overstay its welcome by even a minute. Getting all of the cash is an effective sport extender, and there are just a few little secrets and techniques to spherical issues out properly. You get buck’s price out of it, to make certain.
The Top Hat Club feels prefer it fell out of a unique period of the App Store, for higher or worse. Mostly higher, however I certain do want that “worse” wasn’t there. It’s a enjoyable platformer with intelligent stage designs and a good bit of allure, and whereas it received’t final a very long time it can take in your consideration properly till the tip. Some contact management points and minor UI scrapes saved it from knocking my socks off utterly, however given the extremely cheap value and all the things else it has going for it, I feel I can suggest this to cellular platformer followers.
