Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Some games can be interesting on premise alone. Take Dark Void, a game in which you play a man with a jetpack fighting aliens in an alternate dimension. Tell me that doesn’t sound awesome! Sadly, it doesn’t end up delivering on the promise of the premise, and ends up being just a bit too much on the dull and repetitive side.

The story begins with you as a pilot called Will Augustus Grey, following in the fine Captain Kirk tradition of having protagonists with stupid middle names, who is played by everyone’s favourite everyman, Nolan North. His cargo plane crashes in the Bermuda Triangle, leading him into an alternate dimension, and … well, it’s all a bit ridiculous. Who cares about the alien-slug things? I play a character who can make their heads explode by punching them (not kidding)! Besides, I’m just here to fly around on a jetpack!

Well, if you’re here for the awesome jetpack that was on the cover and in the demo and everything, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit. You don’t get it until the end of the first chapter, which is a real shame, because without a doubt, the best part of this game is the jetpack. It’s just as awesome as advertised. Once you’ve realised the Y-axis is inverted for flight by default and fix that, there’s a great deal of fun to be had by bombing through the skies shooting down and occasionally hijacking flying saucers to the awesome score by Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for the rest of the game. The combat on the ground is rote and generic – the same thing you’ve seen in mediocre third-person shooters many times before. Considering the fun that can be had with the jetpack, there’s little to no excuse for the rest to be as dull and bland as it is. They’ve tried to make the guns interesting, but there’s only about six of them, and they’re all a bit useless, especially considering your massive resistance to enemy weapons fire, and your enemy’s surprising susceptibility to your fists.

One big point touted when the game was being talked about was the ‘vertical cover’ – you can take cover, as the name suggests, vertically – this entail moving up or down a load of platforms sticking out of a wall. It’s a nice idea, but sadly it’s poorly implemented, and most of the time you might as well not bother, as it’s easier to just… use the jetpack – you know, the gimmick the game is built on?

Visually, the game disappoints. The graphics themselves are fine – nothing outstanding but nothing terrible. They’re just drab. Too much brown and grey. The enemies offer little variety or interest visually or gameplay-wise – repetition is the name of the game. There’s quite an interesting little mini-game where you hijack the alien saucers, but after a few times doing exactly the same thing, it becomes tedious.

It seems like the developers don’t make the most of the mechanics, with most battle boiling down to ‘shoot enough saucers to progress’, or ‘protect this big allied ship’. There’s also a problem the game suffers with regards to the jetpack – approach any platform and try to land, and you will die. A lot. Far to many of my deaths in the game seemed to result from my imperative to fulfil the objective the game has tasked me with. On the whole, that’s not a good thing.

The overall impression I’m left with is of the developer dangling a cool toy in front of me, but as soon as I reach out to grab it, snatching it away. And then doing it again. And again. It’s a shame, because it could have been so much better. As it is, it’s just an average-to-bad third-person shooter with a cool jetpack mechanic. 3 out of five Aeropausonauts.