A smarty cat thinks he can sneak away with Bouncy Mouse’s cheese, but he’s got another thing coming! This is one mouse you don’t want to mess with, especially when your world happens to be filled with floating knobs that rubbery mice with elastic tails can use to chase you down.
Android Central recently described Bouncy Mouse as “Cut The Rope Meets Angry Birds.” From our vantage point on the iOS side of the touchscreen pond, we agree with this in three respects: Bouncy Mouse is utterly adorable; Bouncy Mouse is utterly physics-driven; and it’s utterly difficult to imagine Bouncy Mouse not becoming a hit. That last observation rides on the fact that Eric Karl hasn’t just created another physics puzzler — he’s stirred the addictiveness of that genre into a sprawling action adventure game. Suffice it to say, we likey!
The player guides Bouncy Mouse‘s eponymous hero through each level by launching him from knob to knob with an intuitive slingshot action. Waiting for Mouse at the end of his often circuitous route is a cat nibbling on a piece of his cheese collection; with a final well-aimed fling, Mouse barrels into the thief and reclaims a delicious block of cheddar. While this is the player’s ultimate goal, he or she can also play dress-up with Mouse as a reward for collecting all the little cheese balls floating around in each level.
A developer can only make it so far on cute critters and a physics hook, but Eric Karl glues everything together here with impressive level design. The further the player progresses, the more spread out those helpful knobs become, so it’ll take some ingenuity to get Mouse around using reflective ramps, springs, fans, and curving walls where knobs are absent.
With its peculiar brand of action-adventure-physics and a score by Nick Pittsinger that ranges from cartoony fun to some more awe-inspiring mood music, Bouncy Mouse might just evoke nostalgia for old classics like Sonic the Hedgehog. Eric Karl may be the new kid on the block, but Bouncy Mouse makes it clear that he means to play in the big leagues. Is that a blessing through-and-through, or also a curse in disguise? Hey, this is only a preview after all; check out our iFanzine Verdict for the full lowdown the very moment it bounds into the App Store!
iOS gamers might be a bit a miffed that Android got Bouncy Mouse first, but there’s a silver lining here: judging from the game’s Facebook page the developer has been generating updates like crazy in response to user feedback! Maybe the staggered release means Bouncy Mouse‘s first iOS update will hit even before the game itself springs onto everyone’s iDevice? We’ll know the answer soon enough, but for now we’ll leave you with the Bouncy Mouse Twitter feed, website address, and of course a preview video to whet your appetite: