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Titles rarely describe gameplay so accurately.
In FlingSmash, you play as Zip, the legendary hero of Suthon Island. Zip is woken up and tasked with gathering the legendary pearls to banish the evil Omminus before he is able to siphon a mysterious power away from the island’s inhabitants. While the story gets the job done, it mainly serves as an excuse to get you into an enviroment where you can break stuff.
And break stuff, you will. The game puts you in a side-scrolling (or occasionally vertically scrolling) environment in which the goal is to reach the end of each level. Simple enough. The twist is that you do not control Zip precisely, but rather, the direction he flies with sweeping motions of the Wii Remote. Gesturing with the Wii Remote will hurl the sphere-shaped protagonist across the environment, smashing bricks, enemies, and anything else that gets in his way.
Waiting for a short period of time before each swing will cause Zip to charge up, making him fly faster and farther. There are also power-ups that give special properties to Zip for a limited time, such as making him larger or splitting him into three, enhancing his destructive potential.
Several medals are hidden in each level, and the player is required to collect at least three of them to advance to the next stage. The game limits your lives, too, and getting caught behind a wall in a level that scrolls automatically or getting eaten by the Hydracoil that appears at the screen’s edge will cause you to lose a life. Unlike most action games though, losing a life allows you to start exactly where you left off rather than from a checkpoint. Similar to Kirby’s Epic Yarn, scoring well on the default stages of each world will open up paths to additional, more challenging areas.
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FlingSmash won’t win any awards for its visuals. There are some nice graphical touches, such as the particle effects, and the game is bright and colorful. The art style is unique, and developer Artoon put a lot of care into making the game appear different from other titles on the platform. However, the presentation is a far cry from titles like Super Mario Galaxy 2 or Kirby’s Epic Yarn. The beauty of this game, though, is that it doesn’t need a big-budget presentation in order to be fun.
The early levels are deceptively simple, but later areas will task the player with obstacles requiring far more precise aiming. The MotionPlus helps substantially, but there were still times when I found myself unable to fling our hapless hero exactly where I wanted. These moments were relatively infrequent though, and the game is a refreshing merging of the puzzle and platforming genres. Like most Nintendo titles coming out this year, co-op support is also included.
The level variety is great later on, and additional methods of interacting with the environment, including magnets and cannons, keep things fresh. Minor control issues aside, the title serves as a fair demo for what the Wii MotionPlus can do. The game does feel like a downloadable title at times, but the price of admission is well worth it considering the game is bundled with a Wii RemotePlus.
