In the quest to help you preserve and nurture the lovingly symbiotic relationship you must’ve established with your phone by now, the iPhone application store keeps stacking its virtual shelves with awesome goodies at a steady pace. The latest member of the club is a game called Stop The Vom. By the looks of it, it’s guaranteed to provide many an hour of eyeballs-glued-to-the-screen kind of fun.
First things first: The characters and graphics are unbelievably cute. You might dispute my decision to grant first and high place of honor to cuteness, of all factors, but it’s what initially struck me upon viewing the trailer for the game on YouTube, which you’ll find after this paragraph is over. The main cast is comprised of Rabtus, a hybrid of a rabbit and a cactus that “survives in desert conditions and performs photosynthesis in the dark”, and a pickle with “a great technical sense and a love for gadgets” called Cumber.
In a classic protagonist-antagonist cartoony scheme, Cumber’s sole life purpose appears to be to make Rabtus’ existence hell. As seen on the trailer, Rabtus’ falls prey to Cumber’s designs and finds himself stuck in a wooden plank that’s attached to a spring. Whenever the plank is tipped one way or the other, Rabtus is overcome by sickness and the aim of the game is precisely to avoid that -by way of tilting the phone itself- during a specific timeframe, hence the catchy yet very to-the-point name: Stop The Vom.
The basic dynamics are therefore fairly simple, but as it was to be expected, the developers (Miki Mottes and Ziv Meltzer, working under the monicker “Handsome Fellas”) have included little details that add a much welcome layer of difficulty: As the levels progress there will be more than one Rabtus to stabilize and adjusting the balance of one may cause the unbalance of the rest. Also, there’s bonuses to catch and items to beware of such as evil birds and flying oil cans. Overall, I really dig the proposed gameplay here and I can picture it having a fairly significant replay value.
