Developer/Publisher: IUGO Mobile Entertainment
Genre: Arcade
Price: $1.99
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Verdict: Fun to play, but surprisingly simpler than from what we’ve seen from IUGO
Pros: Great presentation, controls, and online multiplayer
Cons: The clock in the corner of the screen can be distracting and take you out of the experience by making you always conscious of how long you’ve been playing.

Cliffed is something that we’ve not seen a lot of from IUGO – a simpler, more casual game than everything else they’ve put out. This isn’t bad; Cliffed is quite fun. It was just a game that defied my expectations, which is a good thing, and shows that IUGO can attack the casual market as well as the more hardcore gamer segment.

Cliffed has you going down, still unceasingly, still inevitably down gaps in cliffs, because the screen is constantly scrolling upwards, and if the screen scrolls up past you, you get cliffed, and it’s game over, man, game over! This seems easy enough, but whenever a review says something along the lines of “this seems easy enough,” you should know by now that, as Admiral Ackbar once declared, “It’s a trap!” There are rocks randomly strewn about in your way, and you have to dodge them as you keep trying to fall down. If a rock gets in your way,  the walls thankfully allow you to teleport around to each side, as you can only move left and right; there’s no jumping allowed, after it was outlawed by the UN. Thankfully, you can also execute a quick dash by double-tapping in a direction. Take that, Ban Ki-moon! The game also speeds up over time; you’ll know when it does because it says SPEED UP! in the background. You can’t miss it.

As far as the core gameplay goes, that’s about it – trying to fall down and down and down and down as long as you can. Cliffed is largely just a quest to achieve as high a score as you can, but there’s plenty to keep you coming back beyond just playing for scores. You can unlock other playable characters (including other IUGO characters) by attaining a certain number of speedups, and there is one you can unlock by getting 20 points in IUGO’s VIP program. There’s also a cool online multiplayer mode, where you and other racers are trying to either be the last man, woman, zombie, or tree stump/ninja standing. You can’t really interact with other players, so it’s largely just a ’shared experience’ form of multiplayer, but this way lag is practically a non-issue, and you can play the game while getting the sensation of kicking the ass of (or getting your ass kicked by) anonymous strangers at the same time. Huzzah! If you prefer your competition to be purely asynchronous, there’s also a global high score list.

Cliffed has a good feel to it – the controls work well, with the left and right sides of the screen reserved for moving in the respective directions. It’s also just a great feeling when you can get going falling down a bunch of gaps at one after another, and when you manage to just escape being cliffed by dashing right for that gap at the last second. The only issue I have with the game is that I found the timer a bit extraneous and distracting, as it makes you conscious of how long you’re playing, and as David Whatley, creator of geoDefense says, great game design shoots for “5 minute” intervals of gameplay – not literally 5 minutes, but the thought that the player can pick up the game and play it and get their entertainment value out of the game in that 5 minute interval, even if you wind up playing for hours upon hours at a time. Cliffed’s timer is always there making you conscious of how long you’re playing, even if an average session for me did last in that “5 minute” timeframe. There is an efficiency element to getting as far down as you can in as little time as possible, but this is mostly useful  for multiplayer purposes. For singleplayer, it would be nice for there to be an option to disable it, as I really don’t care how long it would take to beat a level when I’m playing single-player, I want to get lost in the experience and the clock takes me out of it.

Cliffed is fun to play, and while the simplicity of the game was a bit unexpected from IUGO, it was still a great experience, with a lot of that IUGO polish that’s come to be expected from their games. With only the clock being a distraction, Cliffed is a great casual-style game with a nice selection of features.