App Review No. 59 Timberman

Strong Points:
Addictive
Easy to play
Lots of characters
Nice retro graphics and sound
Good level of challenge

Weak Points:
Repetitive
Not much to do
Long loading times starting up
Leaderboards are full of hackers with impossible scores

In-depth Review:
Release Date:
World Wide: 5th May, 2014

Controls:
Tap either side of the tree to chop wood and dodge the branches

This app puts you into the shoes of one of the greatest heroes of our time. The timber man (or woman). These selfless people give you wood for making things, for fire and for making great little games on your smartphone. And for what? For a branch to the face if their timing is just a bit off.

The gameplay of this app is simple and easy to understand. You tap on each side of the never-ending tree so as to gather wood and dodge the evil branches. You have a time limit in which to do this and you can increase this time limit by chopping the wood faster (this becomes harder as you progress). You level up every 20 points and there is a leaderboard for which to flaunt your success on (although this has been broken a bit due to hackers with impossible scores).

You can collect characters by getting over a certain number of chops in one playthrough, total number of chops etc. and there are lots to choose from and more being added with updates. All the characters look great with good variety between them.

The retro graphics and sounds of this game suit this arcade style game really well and the different backrounds are cool looking as well. The difficulty curve is quite good although with the patterns on the tree changing each time you play; the player does rely on luck and very fast reflexes instead of skill to get a high score.

With not much to do other than chopping wood this game does become repetitive very quickly and the long loading times at the start may put off players coming back to the app.

Conclusion: however, in the end, you will keep coming back to the game for just one more play. And then another. And then another. For, like Flappy Bird before it and countless other games, this app is above all fun to play and very addictive.

Rating: 70%

Thanks for reading, Satamer

Updates:
Separate options for switching music on and off.
Hacking top scores prevention

Update: 5 new characters including Santa and Reindeer! Use Santa to unlock new characters. 2 new Christmas scenarios. A new Christmas Timber song and performance improvements have also been added.

Update: no more Christmas! In addition, two brand new characters have been added: Tim Beardy and Ninja!

Update:
Two new creatures have been added - Timberius and Mage
Performance improvements
64-bit support

Update:
Option to retry after sudden death added
New character - Timber Hook

Update:
Faster replay option if ads were removed as the waiting prompt was removed
Performance improvements
Inner initial ad removed

Update:
Christmas themed update - 6 new characters (including Eddie and Scrooge), Christmas environment with special song and snow!