theSchap's Blog

Who: Devel­oped and Pub­lished by Mini­clip (miniclip.com)

What: Frag physics fun

Where: Many themed worlds

When: NOW! $0.99 on iTunes

Why: Blow­ing stuff up is always entertaining

Physics is the sci­ence that just keeps giv­ing in video games. Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Where’s My Water, and Fruit Ninja are just some exam­ples of games that use physics as a prime game mechanic; maybe you have heard of them? Frag­ger is sim­i­lar in mechan­ics, and throws chal­leng­ing level design and explo­sions on top of it.

Void of any story, your goal is to blow every char­ac­ter in the level apart with small explo­sives, most often grenades. You chose an angle and strength for the tra­jec­tory of your frag and let go, much like you did in Kitty Can­non back in the day. Once it stops, or comes very close, it will explode set­ting of trig­gers, destroy­ing bar­ri­ers, or dis­unit­ing your foes. This con­cept is sim­ple enough but the game­play lies within the level design.

Desert Strike is the name of the first world you must deface by blow­ing every­thing up. It is also the name of a ter­rific game on the Sega Gen­e­sis that occu­pied much of my youth. Things start out pretty sim­ple. Some punks are hang­ing out in holes and behind walls hop­ing you are inca­pable of plac­ing your fin­ger on the screen and then lift­ing it. Dif­fi­culty pro­gresses quite nicely, giv­ing a player the chance to get a feel for how pow­er­ful this SWAT dude’s arm is. At per­haps the 8th level, because the guy stand­ing at the top of the crates is sur­pris­ingly hard to take down, you will real­ize you are out of ammo… FAIL! Though, now you mean busi­ness. Each toss is care­fully planned. Some­times you may even take out two birds with one.… frag, and by birds I mean Counter Strike-like ter­ror­ists. Your rat­ing, 3 stars max, depends on the num­ber of grenades you have once the level is clear.

If you are hav­ing trou­ble on a spe­cific level you can view the solu­tion or skip it, but these are in lim­ited sup­ply and addi­tional ones cost REAL money. A “SAVE MY SOLUTION” fea­ture is a nice addi­tion. It lets you show off your amaz­ing under­stand­ing of physics when applied to grenade tossing.

There are sev­eral Achieve­ments to unlock and Frag­ger works with Game Cen­ter, so you can com­pete with your bud­dies. Com­plet­ing a level often gives you remote bombs that you can set off when­ever, and at some point you get infi­nite ammo, but I don’t remem­ber the exact require­ment for that. The remote bomb buff will help you tremen­dously if you are a com­ple­tion­ist and want to go back through lev­els with per­fect stars. This is cur­rently what I’m work­ing on, and some lev­els are still extremely dif­fi­cult to per­fect. One of the best Achieve­ments asks you to ENRAGE 3 ene­mies and blow them up. To ENRAGE (I can’t seem to type that with­out using caps) some­one you must bean them in the head a few times. Yes, it is funny.

I do have a cou­ple gripes, but the main one is com­mon with any, “aim & fire” mechanic: pixel per­fect accu­racy. Some grenade place­ments require a per­fect angle and power level to attain, and force you into a throw then reset loop until you find the sweet spot. This can feel extremely monot­o­nous. That paired with lev­els requir­ing a sort of pro­gres­sion with the eagle eye shot at the end will make you put the game down. This must be how they sell the Skip and Solve packs. Another small irri­ta­tion is the UI flow. There is no way to exit a level from the com­ple­tion screen, and no way to exit a world from the in game menu. For exam­ple, now that I’m going through lev­els and try­ing for all 3 stars I want to go into a spe­cific level, fin­ish it, and return to the level select screen or even the world select screen. Cur­rently I have to choose Next or Replay to reload a level and then exit to the level select screen. Only from there could I go back out to the worlds. It’s a minor nui­sance, but there’s no rea­son it needs to require that many clicks.

Frag­ger cur­rently has 12 worlds with around 30 lev­els a piece. These worlds are quite unique, and give every­thing just enough of a new taste that it feels dif­fer­ent from before.

Desert Strike & Lost City have a very sim­i­lar theme. You’re a counter ter­ror­ist erad­i­cat­ing ter­ror­ists in new and old urban areas.

Planet X places you on an alien world rid­dled with shin­nies and slimies.

Atlantis puts you into some under­wa­ter ruins with shirt­less dudes that look like ‘Baby’ Brent from ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’.

Artic Storm was released around Christ­mas last year I think so every­one is bun­dled up to look like santa, but that doesn’t mat­ter you still want to blow them up.

Heart Attack is where things start get­ting a lit­tle strange, and I assume this came out last Feb­ru­ary. No longer are you a law enforc­ing offi­cer. You are Cupid in a dia­per, armed with deadly hearts, and forc­ing your love explo­sion on heart bro­ken ban­dits. They die in an explo­sion of hearts so I assume you have helped them.

Hor­ror Ville brings Frankenstein’s Mon­ster out for you to bom­bard in dilap­i­dated build­ings just in time for Halloween.

Ancient Times throws you back to the mid­dle ages against dumb-witted goons in Egypt, Rome, Greece, and South Amer­ica. Your weapon of choice this round is a golden ball of some sort. Golden apple maybe?

Honey Bunny is another hol­i­day themed world. This time you’re wear­ing a bunny suit and chuck­ing deadly eggs at painted tar­gets. It seems a lit­tle sick.

Trea­sure Bay was def­i­nitely inspired by ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’. You’re can­non­ball tot­ing avatar can hardly stand up. I found the inte­gra­tion of pirate items into the con­struc­tion of the lev­els par­tic­u­larly well done in this world.

Mon­ster Dash … I can’t help but think of River City Ran­som when I see the art for this one.

Stick Man makes me happy. I don’t know if it reminds me of the stick men duels from for­ever ago, but this world is entertaining.

The lev­els cre­ate some great puz­zles that range from mak­ing tough throws, to destroy­ing bar­ri­ers to launch­ing other explo­sives in sequence or tan­dem in an effort to reach a hid­den enemy.

Quan­ti­ta­tive Review:

• Game­play: 9.6 — The qual­ity and vari­a­tion in level design that’s crammed into the lim­ited real estate of a phone is ter­rific. The game could use a few alter­na­tive bonus fea­tures like napalm grenades, or clus­ter bombs. Even if they some­what break the game, some­times the reward for beat­ing some­thing as intended, should be rewarded with some­thing ridiculous.

• Visual: 8.9 — The visu­als are quite good, but noth­ing ground­break­ing for the iPhone. The dif­fer­ent themes are well designed, but I’d like to see a bit more vari­a­tion in the ene­mies. Per­haps some defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics in their visu­als to estab­lish a type of neme­sis through­out the worlds.

• Sound: 9.1 — Sound effects were pretty stan­dard, but the sound­track is great. There is some bad ass music in the Mon­ster Dash world, and there’s a song in Heart Attack that will bore itself into the base of your skull.

• Pre­sen­ta­tion: 7.8 — The whole nav­i­ga­tion thing is a pretty irri­tat­ing, but the rea­son it dropped below a B are the ads. You can’t load up the app and com­plete a new level with­out them pimp­ing one of their other games, and you will get harassed to rate the app often, even if you have already taken the time to do so.

• Humor: 8.6 — The devel­op­ers def­i­nitely had a sense of humor with this game and the level themes are a strong indi­ca­tion. Just read­ing through the list above you can tell things are get­ting more and more silly as you go along. I look for­ward to a new world!

• Over­all: 8.8 - Frag­ger has been in my arse­nal for a while now. I’ve lost my progress a few times though phone upgrades and jail break­ing, but I con­tinue to go back and play through it.