Kraken Land: Platformer Adventures

MORE LIKE KRAKEN BLAND. Free with IAP

YOU PLAY AS a cute kraken, inexplicably lacking the ability to swim, that must leap over gaps, jump on top of enemies and perform other platforming tasks in order to reach its captured friend. The music is obnoxiously tropical, as are most of the environments we encountered, which may hint at a younger target audience. That’d be fine if the game wasn’t quite as frustrating to control. There’s little-to-no difficulty in the ‘challenges’ that you face — in the first eight stages, we only encountered a single enemy-type (crabs, the ultimate kraken-destroyers) and we defeated the first boss accidentally by continuously bouncing on its head. However, with the game’s combination of a fixed camera angle, you’re far more likely to die by misjudging jumps or waiting in the regions you thought were safe from the giant swinging axe. There is at least some variety in play: you can pick up a barrel of TNT to ground-pound groups of crabs, hitch a ride on a seagull to haphazardly glide for a while, or eat a chilli and go really fast. There are rewards for speed-running levels, defeating all of the enemies and finding the hidden areas and, as a free-to-play title, there’s naturally about a dozen different formats of currency to collect, spend and (optionally) purchase for real-world dosh. We’d suggest spending your time and money elsewhere, however.