Review: Offspring Fling!

Look before you chuck!

Nawww

From the mind of budding indie developer Kyle Pulver comes yet another retro-styled puzzle-platformer. Offspring Fling! follows the maternal exploits of a fuzzy, yellow bird as she attempts to rescue the little hatchlings she has unfortunately misplaced. How does she go about saving her spawn? By hurling the adorable furballs all over the place. Frankly, I'm a little astonished the species has made it this far, but luckily the chicks seem to possess skeletons that would make Wolverine blush, and can take being smashed against a wall without even the unsightly inconvenience of a bruise. Be that as it may, they're not immune to acid pools and giant hornets, so it'll take every ounce of mama's efforts and your brainpower to suss out the more complex stages and--I can't believe I'm saying this--throw her children carefully.  Nowadays, bird-throwing is becoming something of a subgenre in gaming, but worry ye not innovation-enthusiasts, Offspring Fling! is not the Angry Birds clone its premise might suggest. In fact, it's completely incomparable to the smartphone sensation, focusing instead on a wide variety of evolving action puzzles, with plenty of new hazards and tricks thrown your way with each passing stage.

You don't even have to load this one up to see where its influences lie. Everything about the game screams 16-bit homage, from the trailer sporting an amusing 'Super Pretendo' logo, to the game's cutesy graphics style, two-button control scheme, and simplistic premise. This is the sort of game you really could cut and paste to an old SNES or GBC cart and convincingly pass off as the real deal. Frankly, there were times when I wished it were an old SNES game, if only for the benefit of being able to use a controller. The game's default control scheme--using the arrow keys for movement and Z/X for actions--is frankly diabolical, but even reworking things to WASD provides little improvement. The game's platforming isn't too demanding, too often, but when it is you really begin to notice the awkwardness of the keyboard. Hardware isn't the only culprit here though, the mama bird has something of a floaty jump and difficult sense of momentum, she's one of those rebellious, little characters who just doesn't quite feel ready to respond to your inputs. The game is hardly Super Meat Boy, but at times seems to demand a more accurate control scheme than it bears.

Nintendo could probably sue but who even cares?

Fortunately, the game's progression system helps to make up for its shortcomings in the control department (as does the in-built pad support). Beating levels earns you flowers, beating par times on levels earns you gold flowers, and beating the almost godlike developer times earns you rainbow flowers. What do flowers unlock? Levels! Thus, you'll nearly always have a pretty big choice of available stages, and can jump in and out as you please, skipping the more difficult challenges altogether if you so desire. It's a system Pulver utilised again recently in Snapshot and it works just as well here but, as I said with that game, it can only mask the game's flaws, not erase them. Again, as with Snapshot, it's nice to see the par times thrown in to offer a bit of replayability, and a bonus layer of challenge. Speaking of replays, the game saves ghosts of your best times to race against, and these can even be uploaded and downloaded from the net to really see who is the best fowl flinger. 

The levels themselves are more or less what you would expect. The game, just like plenty of other titles in the genre, has a core mechanic and squeezes a whole lot of mileage out of it. All each stage asks is that you collect your babies and bring them, and yourself, to the exit unharmed. From the humble beginnings of hurling one chick over a gap, right up to levels where you're juggling half a dozen of the sprogs, setting them down on buttons and catching them in mid-air, all while evading killer wildlife. In spite of the huge number of levels and the carefully-paced difficulty curve, I never actually found myself stuck for more than a minute or two. Perhaps the capacity for complications is somewhat limited by the simplicity of the game's mechanic. After all, being able to pick up, throw, and put-down objects is hardly a novelty in video gaming. There really are only so many things one can do with this idea, but you can't fault Pulver's level design; an awful lot of content is eked out of a basic concept. Unfortunately, for the most part, said content doesn't particularly do much to either tease or tingle your brain, and it's all a bit too ordinary. There's a level editor available to download, so maybe the community at large might be able to come up with something special, and at least fans of the game have a way to extend their playtime.

Look at all the retro

Thus, if there's any area where the game falls short, it's unfortunately a biggie. Unlike the Braids and Closures of the world, or even Pulver's more recent offering Snapshot, Offspring Fling! doesn't give you that sense of accomplishment, those "Aha!" moments. I enjoy a puzzle most when, upon solving it, I feel both bewilderment at the intellect of its designer, and pride in my own. Unfortunately, this game never treated me to these emotions. Not once. I completed it in under ninety minutes, and even then barely felt like I'd particularly achieved anything. I'd hate to say the game's too easy, and I don't think it is, but its mechanic is too easy. I spent my whole playthrough waiting for Offspring Fling! to do something out of the ordinary, but it never quite does. The game is cute and simple, that's what it sets out to do and that's what it achieves. Such fast-paced simplicity lends it the feel of an iOS title, and I can't help feeling it would be more successful on that platform. Essentially, this is very much what our modern-day parlance would label a "casual puzzler." There's more than enough fun to be had with it, and for those who often bemoan the difficulty of the genre, this'll be right up your alley. But for the serious puzzle-solvers out there, the only challenge you'll find here is getting to grips with the controls, and mastering each stage to muscle memory in efforts to beat the par times.

Having recently played Pulver's latest game Snapshot, I'm compelled to draw similarities. In both, we have around one hundred levels of puzzling action, with a carefully-plotted difficulty curve, and enough fresh ideas to keep the game from at least getting stale. In both we rely on some cute designs and smart stages to push us along, with neither game presenting much in the way of story. Both are well-made, both are fine little ways to kill a few hours, both are, ultimately, nothing too special. I can just picture the remarkably cute, little chicks of Offspring Fling! looking at me with teary-filled eyes right now as I denounce their game, but--I'm sorry little munchkins--it's the truth. Perhaps, in an effort to emulate the styles of old, Pulver went too far with this one and created a game that certainly would've flown out of the nest in 1992, but can't quite stand-up in 2012. Don't get me wrong, the game has a brilliant look, a super soundtrack, and is a perfectly pleasant way to spend an hour or two, just don't expect that hour or two to be all that memorable.