Globlins – What We Think:

Globlins demonstrates Cartoon Network‘s continuing excellent taste in game curation as it provides a casual puzzle experience with high-quality graphic and audio production and a rather novel chain-reaction game mechanic whose execution is polished and engaging.

Grey Matters

Developed by Hibernum Créations out of Montreal, Canada, you are a quirky young scientist who has discovered an anomaly in the lab…little amoeba-like blobs that reproduce and infect brains, but hate water! It is your task to keep their numbers under control. Essentially, you are tasked with selecting those blobs on the screen that will maximize the damage to others around them. Some four or five taps (or injections of water droplets) on a Globlin causes them to bulk up sufficiently so that they pop. Of course this depletes your reserve of “drops” – thus you only get a finite number of choices before your reserve runs out. Drops are replenished by make strong choices that pop the largest number of Globlins. You must remain vigilant, however, as you use the same reserve to clear four or more consecutive stages to complete a level.

Each time a Globlin pops, it shoots out droplets that either pop neighboring Globlins or cause them to bulk up one step. There are also mutant Globlins that shoot out extra droplets in a mad fury or shoot them out diagonally. You can spawn one of these by paying 50 coins at any time. There are also extra “tools” in some levels that include springboards that cause drops to bounce back and forth – iterating the growth of any Globlins on that lane, teleporters, and other types of droplet direction-changers.

Science for Sale

When you form combos you are awarded extra coins that you can eventually spend on special Gadgets that either multiply your points, or increase the possibility of spawning mutants, and other stuff. You can also just use the in-app purchasing method to buy all the damn coins your wallet can handle. More on that later.

It appears that the levels are somewhat randomized, or that there are several variations for each that spawn randomly, which either belies the clever programming, since on some level, there must be a solvable solution within a certain number of attempts or that at the very least offer a nice variety for added replay value.

Physics Challenge

Speaking of which, there are a whole lot of levels and even bonus challenges on offer here. It took me a lot of time to beat just the first world which comprised ten increasingly challenging levels. So you will easily get your money’s worth, so long as you enjoy the chain-reaction mechanic.

The graphics are welcoming as one might expect from a cartoon network game, something out of Pinky and the Brain perhaps, as is the sound design – a sort of quirky Danny Elfman meets Dick Dale score.

The only drawback to Globlins, and this is a personal and controversial gripe – is that it is monetized by virtue of in-app purchases. Fortunately it is a rather innocuous QOL (quality of life) implementation, as it really only allows you to continue from a fail state without having to restart a level, as opposed to operating as a speed bump. That aside, this is an excellent choice for casual gaming fans for mobile devices.

Amoeba Amour

For all the casual games clones out there, I still give Globlins a solid recommend for when you want freshen up your game library and take on a legitimate puzzle challenge.

Get Globlins at the Android App Store

Get Globlins at the iTunes App Store

[xrr rating=”4/5″]