Aqua Teen Hunger Force Destruct-O-Thon

Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim has brought quite a few characters with odd names, weirder looks and zany stories to life on our screens and there’s possibly none more bizarre than Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

The talking milkshake cup, bearded french fries carton and gelatinous meatball (better known as Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad) all put in an appearance in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Destruct-O-Thon. For me, I’ve been anticipating a game which features these quirky characters as they deserve something amusing and equally off-the-wall to bring many drab mobiles to life.

However, this is a rather sluggish attempt at making a game for the mobile and for me seems a bit disappointing all in all. Although this is far from a total disaster, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen this all before.

Fans of the web games where you must play baseball with a penguin in an attempt to get the greatest distance, or Inanaka Crash (well worth a look despite its failure to be translated to English), you will instantly see similarities in this game. The object is to gain as much speed up as possible before picking the angle at which to launch an object down the street. Each level has slightly different variations, such as; scoring points by hitting it the greatest distance and touching objects, alternatively it’s launching something to hit a target at a certain distance.

There are 15 levels and indeed, some are very tricky to get right, not necessarily because you can’t get enough power in the run-up, but the angle gauge is extremely difficult to get right and you’ll end up either knocking an object high into space but not moving forward at all, or the object will tumble at ankle-height for a few yards before grinding to a halt! This serves as quite a nuisance, particularly as to get the speed up in the first place involves multiple taps of the ‘ok’ button, only to be rewarded by a naff hit, gets a little irritating and saps the fun a bit.

Unlike games of total skill, this game totally relies on chance; both by fluking the perfect run-up and again by judging the correct angle. If you get the right rub of the green along the way, you’ll without fail complete the level with an impressive score. However, you can easily do virtually everything identically and for being a fraction out one way or another, you’ll end up under or over-hitting the object, missing the end target or failing to achieve the objective.

The only modicum of humour and novelty that’s been injected into this game are the things the characters say when hitting the object and after the successful or unsuccessful attempt and the objectives in each level. For example one level is to detonate a stick of TNT in a car. This is far from easy, not because the distance is nearly unobtainable, but importantly you have to try and get the dynamite to be lit by a flame along the way (again totally down to chance).

So overall, this is an entertaining game for those who are a fan of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force and those who like the twisted kind of humour of knocking random objects as far as you can. If you like puzzles, there’s a bit of an element in terms of gauging distances and trajectories, but with only 15 levels, you’ll probably whiz through it in no time.

Rating 65%

Positives

Some original humour from the TV show

Quite entertaining (in a frustrating way)

Negatives

Totally unimaginative

Very repetitive

Game life-span could be pretty short if you’re quite good at these style games

Graphics are pretty poor (but then again the ATHF are hardly works of art)