Review: Super Penguins

Super Penguins comes to us from newly established, London based developer Supersolid and with this game they are off to a great start.

Super Penguins is free to download for your iOS or Android device and is a worthy addition to the stable of great endless run games released recently. While having been compared to Temple Run, Super Penguins is more akin to Halfbrick’s Jetpack Joyride, albeit in 3D and running forwards rather than sideways.

Taking control of a cute little penguin you head forwards, tilting your device to move left or right and tapping the screen to jump. The aim is to make it as far as possible, while collecting as many fish as you can and saving all the little penguin friends you see. While relatively simple and easy to begin with, as you move further along the path the game speeds up, dropping obstacles in your path and requiring lightning quick reflexes to survive. This of course leads to failure and the drive to have “just one more go” and beat your previous score. Super Penguins is deviously addictive. Playing on public transport, I twice missed my stop due to being on such a good run.

The fish you collect are the in-game currency and can be used to purchase temporary or permanent power-ups to assist in getting that extra few hundred metres on your next run.  The penguin friends you see on the course are being held captive by unfriendly octopuses and by colliding with them you are granted one of a few different powerups ranging from a rocket boost that propels you several hundred metres forwards, a fish sucker that sucks up all nearby fish without having to actually touch them and a short invincibility power-up that transforms your penguin into a giant ‘penguinzilla’.

Whilst there is an in-game shop where you can spend your hard earned fish on rewards and an option to spend real money on ‘fish packs’, the game never forces the idea of spending real money on you. While it would take a lot of play time, it is possible to see all that Super Penguins has to offer without spending any money. That being said, the sooner you can level up your power-ups the sooner you will be able to score big.

The presentation of Super Penguins, while not mind blowing and certainly not in the upper echelons of mobile gaming graphics seen in the past, is clear, crisp and very cute, not to mention the fluidity and smoothness of the animation. The music bops away in your ears and really helps set the happy fun-time mood that the game is going for.

Where Super Penguins falls down a little is its lack of variety and general repetitiveness once you’ve spent some time with it. The courses, while randomly generated half only have a dozen different elements. While obstacles like random icicles, gaps opening in the ground and giant octopus tentacles add flavour, once you know the different sections it becomes much easier to navigate.

The one major issue with Super Penguins is that on more than one occasion during a run, the game paused and displayed an ad right in the middle of the screen. This could be closed easily enough and the game resumed but it was very intrusive and disrupted the flow of the game. It also felt overly intrusive and unwelcome.

However, while there are some minor gripes, pop up ads in game being chief among them, they are indeed minor. The ads were infrequent and rare and the lack of variety in the course can become an advantage once you start getting over 5000 metres and the game’s speed increased dramatically. Having an intimate knowledge of the different sections really does come in handy.

Here’s hoping the community gets behind Super Penguins in the same way they did Jetpack Joyride and we get some additional content to keep the longevity of the title going.

By the way, my top score is 6786 metres; let us know if you can beat me.