Devolver Digital’s latest iOS game is a short but entertaining puzzler, featuring pretty visuals and a simple story. Here’s our full Umiro review for iPhone and iPad.
We’ve all been there. You go out on the lash, pass out drunk and wake up in a strange land covered in glowing crystals and evil blobs that kill you on contact. Just a typical Saturday here at Recombu Towers.
Minus the drinking part, that’s the precise situation that Umiro’s heroes find themselves in. Huey and Satura have no memory of how they arrived in this mysterious world. They don’t even remember how they originally met, or much at all about their previous lives. However, it’s pretty obvious that they’ll have to work together in order to escape this crazy place and get back home.
Gameplay is pretty straightforward. To beat each level, you simply have to trace a path for the two protagonists to follow, from their starting positions to the crystals which act as exits. Huey must make it to the blue crystal, while Satura aims for the red. Once your pathways are complete, hit the play button and the pair will blindly stroll wherever you told them to.
However, once our heroes are in motion, you can’t stop them. And to make things tricky, each level has a number of hazards. From killer black blobs that patrol on set routes to poisonous gas that must be shut down by hitting a button, this place is filled with deadly traps. Therefore you’ll have to carefully consider your chosen pathways, and hit the ‘play’ button at just the right time.
Familiar territory
If this all sounds strangely familiar, it’s because other mobile games such as Droidscape use the same mechanics. Still, while Umiro isn’t exactly original, we enjoyed blasting through the 40 levels on offer. Level design is smart and there’s enough variety to keep you hooked, even for quite lengthy play sessions. We also love the artistic visuals, from those hand-painted cutscenes to the Japanese-style flavour of each level.
Sadly Umiro is a short-lived experience. The game is broken into four acts, with each act serving up ten levels. We managed to blaze through all of these levels in just a couple of hours, collecting all of those yellow crystals as we went. And while some levels pose a bit of a challenge, puzzle fans shouldn’t be stumped at any point.
Although we’ve played this kind of game before on our iPhones, the thoughtful level design and neat presentation make Umiro worth a purchase. You can grab it from the App Store for iOS devices from March 29.
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