Quick Look: Gold Miner Joe for iPhone
Well I suppose it had to happen some day. I found a Donut Games game that I’m not very fond of. Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not a terrible game, but I’m just not really getting into it. The graphics are okay but everything’s so small. The music is good, but since it’s not a rhythm game, the music will only get you so far. The game play is pretty standard platforming fare, which wouldn’t be so bad except that I don’t like the control scheme. Plus, there’s that something that’s hard to describe that makes most Donut Games products so much fun that just isn’t with the poor gold miner.
Joe is the modern Miner 2049er, running around a series of tunnels trying to collect all the gold he can find. Each level contains a certain amount of gold, and you must claim it all to unlock the door to the next level. Besides the basic ability to jump, you can throw rocks at your opponents or blow them up with sticks of dynamite. You can also duck to avoid some certain unwieldy hillbillies shooting at you from garbage barrels. Speaking of which, there is definitely an interesting variety of critters in these mines. About the only “standard” bad guy is the bat. Then you have the aforementioned hillbillies, along with caveman like creatures and various hostile shellfish. There may be other creepy crawlies as you progress through the game, but this is what I’ve encountered so far.
You swipe to left and right to move accordingly, and up to jump. Separately these work pretty good, but sometimes it can be hard to move and jump at the same time, which can cause problems when you’re trying to do something like jump off a platform. You swipe down to duck or climb down a ladder. To throw rocks you simply tap the screen repeatedly. This also works pretty well, though there are times when it’s hard to tweak the position of Joe just right so you can hit something. The biggest issue is with setting dynamite. The instructions say to tap the screen in one spot for a couple of seconds, but quite often it seemed like I was unable to set the dynamite. This of course would become a problem when I had a group of cavemen headed towards me, for example.
Something else I didn’t really care for was the lack of a multi-tiered scoring system. There are lots of things to pick up to get extra points, but since you simply either beat a level or you don’t, there’s no real impetus to go back and play the levels again like there is in most other Donut Games offerings. It also seemed a bit odd that “bonus” levels had to be completed before you could go on. To me bonus levels should be optional. But then, that’s just me.
The graphics certainly have the feel of a Donut Games product. However, they just seem so small. There are some nice little details, however, like the wisp of smoke that rises when a box (or you) get consumed by one of the many fires littered about the mines. Did I mention that everything just seems so small? The sound effects are all right, though a couple things like whatever the hillbilly utters when he pops up and Joe say “Yeah, some dynamite” crack me up. The music is pretty good, and there are at least two or three different tunes that get rotated among the levels.
As I do most of the time, I continued to play Gold Miner Joe while I was writing this review, and I must admit that it’s started to grow on me a little bit. I still don’t think it’s up to Donut Games standards, but I appreciate it more than when I started. Still, a less than natural control scheme, lack of incentive to replay levels, and the general smallness of the visuals are somewhat disappointing. As such, I find myself for the first time unable to give a Donut Games game a Recommended rating.
Final Verdict: On The Fence
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Tags: Dount Games, Gold Miner Joe
