Gameplay Today - Because You're Always Gaming

With its equally astounding gameplay, sound design, and art direction, Grumps is a serious contender for worst paid iPhone game on the app store. I could just say “don't buy it” and leave the review at that, but I suppose some explanation is needed so lets start with the gameplay. You tap on the screen to start and tap the bottom of the screen to pause. You control your “character” by tilting the iPhone (or iTouch) left or right to move in those respective directions to avoid the falling Grumps (angry emoticons) while collecting the smiling ones and bombs (black circles with “bomb” written in them). There are exactly five grumps on the screen at any given time which fall straight down with speed and horizontal placement based on (from what I can tell) a simple random value algorithm. You tap the screen to use a bomb which wipes it of grumps and that's the entire game. There is no increased difficulty, no real challenge, no depth and the only change comes from a switch in background and what your “character” wears for every ten thousand points you collect.

This game has possibly the worst graphics I have ever seen. The object models themselves aren't bad, but there are less than ten of them in the entire game. As bad as that is, it hardly makes Grumps eligible for “worst graphics ever.” The thing is, this is a game with no animation. Don't get me wrong: there is movement. Your “character” moves horizontally across the bottom of the screen. I have thus far used double quotation marks to describe your “character” because it is a still image of something vaguely resembling a person with jeans and a black shirt containing an unreadable message. Emoticons fall vertically down, and a comic-style “KAPOW” graphic expands from the center of the screen to signal a bomb going off. There is no other movement in the game to speak of and as anyone who knows the subject will tell you, the translation or magnification of otherwise still images can hardly be called “animation.”

This amazing game also features a grand total of six sound bytes: one when you start the game, one when you lose, one when you use a bomb and three that play whenever you collect specific falling emoticons. Because those three sounds are someone (I would have to imagine the game creator) saying “oh”, “yeah”, or “got it” and the entire point of the game is to collect these faces, the repetition of these noises gets very, very annoying in no time at all. The music just confuses me. The entire soundtrack is a single and simple, looping orchestral melody. It is not particularly bad, but you would be hard-pressed to find any music sample that could fit a game less. It seems like the creator of Grumps just used the first public domain .mp3 file he found and threw it in the game. Uninspired, unoriginal, and downright bad, the sound in Grumps truly lives up to the pedigree of the rest of the game.

There is a single positive thing I can say about Grumps: it uses OpenFeint. That's right; for whatever reason, Grumps features both leaderboards and achievements. On my second attempt (after using my first to grasp how the game plays), I became #12 in the world in this game, and it is only because of OpenFeint and the possibility of being #1 in the world at something that I would ever play this game again. So if you want to pay $1 for a game where you can easily become the world leader and don't care about the quality of the product, then go ahead and pick this one up. Otherwise, stay far away from Grumps. It would be a difficult task to throw a stone in the app store without hitting a game that tries the same thing as Grumps and not only does it far better, but costs nothing.