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Cut the Rope was one of the App Store’s more prominent success stories, and its skill-based puzzle challenges made it much more fun than Angry Birds ever was. Yes, I went there.
Cut the Rope: Experiments, then, takes the well-worn business model of iterating a few new features on top of some new artwork in a bid to make you buy what is essentially the same product a second time.
I don’t necessarily mean that as a negative, but there’s not much on offer here that you can’t already get in the original Cut the Rope, and it would have been preferential to get some more challenging puzzles for the millions of people who have already rinsed the original – Experiments tends to lean a bit too close to the achingly easy for my tastes.
But it’s okay! Don’t panic. What you do get, at least until ZeptoLab inevitably add a few extra packs of levels, is the voice of a crazy scientist and 75 more levels themed around two new gadgets – the experiments, if you will, which come in the form of rope guns and suction cups. Sitting alongside all those are the objects from the first game, such as trampolines, bubbles, and good old spikes.
For the most part it’s a continuation of Cut the Rope’s extra content packs: add in another 25 levels and theme them around some new puzzle element. Both the rope gun and suction cup add extra weight to the regular momentum of the puzzles, and while it won’t take you more than an afternoon to blaze through all the new content it’s entertaining while it lasts.
One of the reasons Cut the Rope works so well is because of the brisk nature of its puzzles; they’re generally over in less than 20 seconds and it’s sublimely easy to restart and have another crack if you accidentally mess up. At its best you’re pulling off dazzling trick shots with relative ease, flinging a little ball of candy around a map before dropping it into the gob of some green thing I imagine Chillingo will probably try and make a cuddly toy of in the near future.
Some of the new puzzles effectively show off ZeptoLab’s creative energy, but for the most part we’re being sold another slice of an admittedly entertaining game. Still, it’s hard to feel short-changed when considering the weenie price and, more importantly, it’s impossible to discount the entertainment derived from its content.
