Campers! on iOS: Heavy on gimmicks, light on fun
While summer may be coming to a close, that doesn't mean we still can't celebrate long days and cool nights on iOS, and Glu Games is allowing us to do just that, in theory, via the release of Campers! on iPhone and iPad.
Campers! sees you building a summer camp in the wilderness, as you control each individual camper via touch and drag mechanics. You'll tap on a camper and then drag your finger across the screen to form a dotted line that they'll walk along, interacting with items that they may touch along the way. This mechanic responds well, in that the line is actually drawn where your finger moves, but it requires you to constantly zoom your view in and out to see where you want the character to walk long-term and they can easily bump into items if you happen to draw a line too close to obstacles.
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Your objectives in Campers! are presented through simple quests, asking you to build new cabins, activities and more for the camp, or to send your campers out on field trips, where they'll collect resources like leaves and pine cones. Perhaps the biggest flaw within Campers! comes with this resource collection, as you'll need to drag lines for your campers to physically walk over the coins and bonuses that appear when completing tasks. That is, they won't simply be added to your account automatically (or even by you tapping on them), as is the case in basically every other game of this type, but will force you to spend time making your camper walk over them to collect them. Needless to say, this is an incredibly tedious process that limits the overall fun factor of the entire game.
This is unfortunate too, as Campers! comes with some cute art and interesting items to build along the way (along with some mini-games like rafting), but you'll need to spend so much time needlessly drawing lines every which way across the screen back at camp that the experience becomes more boring than fun. If anything, Campers! offers other iOS developers an example of how not to use gimmicks like line-drawing - they might be fun when used sparingly, but as the entire control scheme of a game, unfortunately aren't. If you'd still like to give Campers! a shot, you can now download the game for free on iTunes.
Click here to download Campers! on iTunes --->
Have you tried Campers! on iOS? What do you think of the game's control mechanics, or the overall game in general? Sound off in the comments!
