iPhone Review: A Game About Smashing Bombiez, iHooy!

Developer/Publisher: Braineaters
Genre: Castle Defense
Price: $0.99
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Verdict: Not worth the download
Pros: It didn’t crash the iPhone
Cons: Poor controls, poor graphics

A Game About Smashing Bombiez, iHooy, (or iHooy as the app is titled) appears on the surface to be an attempt to make a castle defense game with blood and colorful captions between stages, however it comes across as a poorly designed Flash game ported over to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The game starts out with a short back story illustrated through still images and crudely written captions and a brief explanation of the controls. The story is that apparently some sort of zombie outbreak has developed, but rather than zombies they are known as Bombiez; the reason why is never explained. Perhaps they blow up when they reach the walls you are trying to defend, but the story and graphics don’t really make that clear.

The game play is simple: fixed defenses either crush, maim or drop Bombiez in a pit by activating switches to trigger defenses in time as the Bombiez arrive. Crushed or otherwise disposed of Bombiez leave a red splotch. The controls are not that intuitive, with a definite lag between input and the game at some points.

The two game play modes, “Till We Die” and “Start Defense,” are different only that in “Start Defense” there is an attempt at a story where the player is travelling across a map fighting the Bombiez at different places with different defenses. The instruction images before each fight in “Start Defense” are confusing and poorly captioned, a recurring theme in iHooy.

It was hard to find anything to like about iHooy; the graphics are poor, captions and instructions are likewise poorly written, and often have adult language thrown in for merely the sake of adding “color” to the game. The animations are of similar quality to Nintendo graphics from the 1980s. There is no online play, nor any leaderboards, and really nothing to justify a one-dollar cost. If it were a free app, it still wouldn’t be worth the time it took to download.