Platforms: iPod touch, iPhone, (2.5/5).
Gobtron opens by flashing up a faux-ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) rating of “I for Immature”. I ask you, what could possibly be more mature than a majestic, mountain sized, hot-pink, fluffy, rectangular pig monster, enduring humanity's destructive march through history by consuming tribe after tribe of primitive man with its chameleon tongue-like right nostril mucous drippings? Not Grand Theft Auto, that's for darn sure.
Beginning on armorgames.com, Gobtron has been ported to iOS for the benefit of bus commuters and loo gamers, and to the chagrin of the easily distracted. The move was appropriate for the touch screen, with players pitching their asparagus-coloured snot in much the same stretch-back method employed for the archetypal Angry Birds slingshot. As new methods are unlocked (these methods are, of course, all snot, booger, loogie and other US colloquialism related), they all require a simple and intuitive input method like tapping or swiping.
Over 18 levels and 5 historical periods (ranging from cave-guys to Egypt-guys to modern and futuristic-guys), you'll spend a disappointingly short time dealing with a disappointingly tiny challenge. Belying the automatic weapons and aircraft that human society eventually cottons onto, the game never really gets difficult or strategic and it's over in about an hour.
That being said, it probably isn't designed to be a mechanically balanced, razor sharp tome of pocket strategy, and slamming people over and over with your booger can be quite therapeutic. The sound and graphics design are certainly charming. Maybe I'm expecting too much from a game about absorbing people with different kinds of sickly effluvia.
Gobtron
