Whale Trail Review (iOS)

It doesn’t matter how cute everything is. It doesn’t matter how endearing guiding a flying whale away from a shadowy monster is. It doesn’t matter how high my heart is lifted with every rendition of “I can see my house from heeere”. Whale Trail takes every molecule of joy that has been distilled and injected into its every facet and crushes it beneath the heavy boots of a nasty spoilsport. And it leads me to ask one simple question: why would you create something so wonderful, so near perfection and then steadfastly set out to ruin it at every turn?

It’s not like there’s one single thing that sucks the fun out of it all. Almost every design choice away from the aesthetics is arguably borrowed from somewhere else but, most importantly, each is implemented in a way that hinders player progression. Each represents another blow against enjoyment. If there’s a choice for the developers to make between easy and hard, you get the hard every time. It’s maddeningly frustrating.

Take, for instance, the way the camera zooms right into our beleaguered whale as he gets closer to the bottom. This means the player is unable to very far ahead, making the navigation of a cloud infested sky all the more difficult. Yet this isn’t a choice – players have to collect rainbow drops to keep the whale moving forwards and these inexplicably exist at the bottom rather than the top in the vast majority of routes. A lack of rainbow drops means falling, and falling means death. You have to go down there, and you have to stay down there.

The highs are saved for exactly that which is a shame, they’re the best bits. Looping the loop, grabbing a star and munching on some clouds is majestic when you’re up there. Down here? In the cheap seats? It’s a slog. The glory of swimming along through the sky forgotten as I come across yet another impossible to predict or prepare for section of maze and slam the phone down in exasperation.

I like that I can do that when I game these days. It’s like dealing with an angry girlfriend. “I won’t even SPEAK TO YOU I’m so angry!”. *SLAM*

These problems aren’t helped by the procedurally generated levels. I don’t really know what that means, but I think it’s when the computer tries to randomise what you play to keep it fresh and exciting. Tiny Wings did one new set of areas every day and I’m pretty sure Whale Trail does too. Unfortunately, it does so in smaller chunks and it’s not uncommon to see the same couple of screens repeated on a single play through. It’s very disconcerting to just make it through a tricky bit only to be faced with the exact same challenge less than a minute later.

Linking into this are the fiddly, maze like areas you have to try to get through, desperately avoiding moving clouds, grabbing rainbow drops in a vain effort to keep your rainbow drop fuel tank full. These areas suck. The Whale making Trails should be all about big sweeping troughs and peaks, gliding majestically through the game as you swoop below clouds to grab a new reservoir. The main issue with that is that it would make it near identical to Tiny Wings.

So, instead, you get to try to make tiny movements through an obstacle course and through insanely tight spaces that you didn’t see until they were right on top of you thanks to the crappy camera and then you get zapped with lightning and fall out of the sky and get eaten by the evil shadow monster.

And breathe.

All the best bits of the game – the swooping, the seeing of your house from there, the last minute grabbing of rainbow drops – is interspersed through exercises in punishment and guesswork. The scoreboard shows there are people who love it, who have mastered it and gotten past that which I could not. Good for them, I’m happy for them.

I’m not happy when I play this, though. It makes me sad and angry in equal measure. With such artistic merit, with such near genius this could have actually been better than Tiny Wings. It’s so close. Instead it eschews this in favour of punishing me for wanting to play it. In the words of the Shatner, I can’t get behind that.

Whale Trail is available now for 69p from the iTunes store for iOS 4.1 or greater.