Every other week I come across an Angry Birds rip-off on App Store. 9 out of 10 times the app is not even worth downloading. Today I’ll be reviewing The Drop Out – an app that at first glance looks a lot like Angry Birds, but seem to have much more in store.
In The Drop Out, there are 4 worlds to explore, each with 30 stars/levels to enjoy (the concept sounds pretty familiar, right?). Each level provides a new obstacle to beat and the gameplay is pretty easy to get around. In an Angry Birds-like way you drag and drop a tiny ball of fur from the left side of the screen to try and push away all of the little boxes on the plateau (which by the way looks a lot like Spongebob Squarepants). Each and every level has a time limit on them and it really gives you a challenge to beat it on time. When you go through the different worlds you earn the ability of using different attack balls to beat the levels and quite fast it became a carrot for me to continue playing.
Sound. SOUND. This app is built around the sound effects, and they are amazing. They are difficult to describe and probably has to be experienced while playing but let me put it this way: I loved playing this game with sound on, my wife hated when I played it. Every time you shoot one of the balls they make a cute “whiii” sound and every time they hit one of the square blocks they say something like “capico” which of course doesn’t make sense, but I just love it.
Visually, this game isn’t anything special – quite static in the graphics but it matches the whole picture of this app; it’s cute and easy.
This app is a really good one. I loved the sound effects and the fact that I couldn’t complete all the levels in one sitting which seems to be the case in a lot of games nowadays (or am I just too good?). It was also really easy to understand and get into – I got stuck straight away!
What I found pretty quickly though, was that the difficulties of the levels increase dramatically fast – after just 6 or 7 levels it becomes really difficult to beat the level and it nearly made me frustrated, but also made me play it more and more!
One thing that could have been done better is the way the app is handling gravity, sometimes it just feels like the ball is flying away without any gravity at all. The Drop Out is available now through iTunes ($0.99, App Store link).