A steady finger won’t seem to be much help in Chuck Gnome from Movable Sprites, but at least there are a couple ways to approach it. You can just fling as many gnomes as possible and try to hit the proper targets to get the key which will unlock new levels,
or you can try to be as precise as possible and rack up massive score multipliers. How massive? My best score on the first level went from 50,000 to 2,200,000, so that massive.
I did some testing and I have to say, it’s rather difficult to quickly fire numerous gnomes at exactly the same spot. Sure, you could slide your finger to pull back on the gnome-loaded slingshot and wait a second until the aiming comes up, but often you don’t as much time as you would like. So I took to the rapid fire mode in order to open the levels. I don’t know that you could do it any other way really as I often ran out of time before ever seeing a key.
There is some strategy built into the game though as you need to knock down the proper sets of targets to get to the next proper set until you get the key. There are six levels in the game and you start with two. So there are four keys to find. Some just seemed to pop up as I was playing through a level and others seemed to really be buried deep and need a very specific pattern (When Ogres attack, choose the right side). It’s almost like a trick to extend the gameplay so they didn’t have to do so much coding of levels.
The controls on the game are far from complex being only a finger drag to launch Chuck in whatever direction. There is also this stupid tilt option which forces you to tilt the screen at angles that make viewing it difficult in order to see a tiny bit more of the screen on one side or the other. The game is only playable in portrait mode, why they didn’t just include a landscape mode and do away with that is well beyond me. Perhaps they thought it added challenge, when really it’s just extra frustration.
