Ready to give a candy crazy kid their sought after sugar high? Welcome to Piñata Smash where the name of the game is tip tapping destruction.
The object of this new pick up and play title from Chillingo is to give a kid his candy until he inflates and ultimately floats away. This is where the tapping comes in. You have to tap colorful objects as they bounce around the screen through 36 levels divided into three different world.
The game sounds like candy exploding Shangri-La, but as the levels advance this isn’t just some fanciful free ride for candy. The gracefully floating donkeys that bounce about like unmissable beach balls quickly become more evasive, but that’s not the only challenge in Piñata Smash.
There are also bad bunnies that make the boy skinny from vegetables, crocodiles that eat the candy you’ve managed to tap out of piñatas, and bombs that make everything disappear. Almost every level provides players with a brand new twist, but somehow even rocket launchers aren’t enough to make Piñata Smash as fun as it should be.
It’s not that there’s anything amis with the game necessarily. The cardboard cutout style graphics are fun right down to the boy at the bottom who inflates in his horizontally striped shirt, but for all the entertaining sound effects and clock racing level challenges somehow Piñata Smash just doesn’t bring home the goods.
The idea itself is clever and there are some good game additions like the ability to give other friends candy from within the game, but somehow all this tapping just doesn’t feel worth it.
Even the gold bronze and silver level achievements coupled with the ability to buy new whacking weapons as an upgrade to the standard baseball bat aren’t enough to keep Piñata Smash entertaining for all that long. Pick it up and play for a few minutes and it might seem addictive at first, but all said and done there are other ways to spend a buck in the app store.
Bottom Line: Candy acquisition game Piñata Smash shows promise with a “give your friends candy” social integration but despite all the nail biting time limits and new enemies, this piñata is surprisingly empty.
