Square Meal

Game: Square meal
Developer: Nitrome
Platform: pc

What is it?
This game is a game whereby you have this square-looking monster. YOU as the player has to control this square monster to eat other monsters(enemies) in each level. The objective is simple and direct and quite typical.


Uniqueness?

Gameplay
However, this game added something interesting. The square monster attacks with its mouth. YOU as the player controls the monster to stuff different type of blocks into its mouth and then shoot the blocks out to knock out the monster enemies. Thereafter player can go and eat up the monsters while it is in a dizzy state. However if the monster wake up and the player touches it,the player will die and have to restart the level again.There are various different types of blocks in the game.Examples like stone,metal,wood blocks. Each types of blocks has a unique attribute to it. For example, the wood will be destroyed once it hit the walls in the game. This meant each wooden blocks can only be used once. The unique attributes of each type of bloacks are not known to the players at the start of the game. Thus it adds in a surprise element to the players as they will discover it while playing the game.


Enemies
There are various types of enemies in this game and each type of enemies have different attributes to it too. The brown looking jelly like creatures are the easiest to kill and the game will get harder as more difficult/sly enemies are added in the later levels. The character design of the enemies looks good to me as it sort of tells me what special attributes it has. For example, the bull skull like creature looks like a bull to me and hence its attribute is to charge upon seeing the square character(player).


Levels
The game is a top down view game ,similar to the bomberman game that i reviewed perviously. The levels are carefully think of as it is kind of a strategy game too. Players have to carefully think which types of blocks to pick up and deal with the different types of monsters, or else they might end up with insufficient blocks to kill the monsters.


Drawbacks
One of the drawbacks of the game is that once the square monster touches other monster, the square monster dies and player has to restart that level again. this is quite irriating to me as i feel that player should have at least 3 lives for each level before they have to restart the same level when they die.
















Screenshot of the gameplay