iPhone Review: Cut the Rope

Cut the Rope doesn’t really surprise with it’s concept – you cut ropes. Luckily for us gaming types, it’s one of the best games going.

When first loading the game you open your front door to discover a box. In the box is a cute little creature who chomps on chunks of candy that you need to feed it. Doing this involves negotiating a series of ropes, bubbles, spikes and other tricky obstacles which span four box styles – cardboard, fabric, foil and gift. Early levels are quite straight forward and get you used to the idea of cutting ropes, using momentum and gravity to swing the candy in the right way to reach the pet monster thing. But later level introduce complications – spiders that crawl along the ropes to steal the candy, spikes that shatter it into lots of pieces, and bubbles which make the candy float.

Further on you get ways to change the length of the ropes, blow the bubbles around and slide the rope holders along predefined tracks, and it all adds up to quite a brainteasing experience, but never one that feels unfair. Each level also has three stars for you to collect, some of which only exist for a set amount of time before disappearing. While getting through the levels themselves isn’t a huge task, collecting every star in the process certainly is.

The game shows the promise of new levels coming soon, and this is certainly welcome news considering the 4 current boxes might not keep you going for all that long. But even Angry Birds started with a handful of levels, and the developers continuously added new stuff to the point it became one of the most addictive and most spoke about games on the iPhone. With the right level of support, this could easily turn into the next Angry Birds.

So at the moment, it’s a very fun game. It looks great on the retina display, gives a sensible challenge without ever becoming absurd and ties in nicely with Game Centre’s achievements. What holds it back is the relative short nature of what’s initially available, but that’s no reason to ignore it, especially considering it’s such a cheap game.

Price: £0.59 / $0.99