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Sling re-shot

by RevStu (October 21st, 2010 at 8:50 am)

This was odd. About a month back, a brilliant game arrived on the App Store called Finger Sling. I downloaded it, loved it, and posted a brief piece on my blog about it, promising more detail in the next day or two. A couple of days later I sat down to write about it in depth, fired up iTunes to get the URL and it was gone. While the Lite version was still available (weird in itself, as the full game had been free anyway), the game proper had simply vanished out of existence. Anyway, long story short, it’s back! Yay!

The returned Finger Sling (still free), now at version 2.0, claims improved graphics, controls and gameplay. After a quick spin through a couple of dozen levels I can’t spot a single thing that’s changed except for the Home-screen icon, but luckily that means it’s still the same excellent game it always was.

It’s another game in the recently-popular “defend the core” genre, and in this case the object you’re defending is a big white ball which starts off in the middle of a circle drawn on the playfield. Smaller brown balls drift in from all directions and try to knock the white ball out of the circle, at which point you lose. Your only defence is a pale yellow ball attached to a piece of elastic with which you can sling it around to knock it snooker-style into the brown balls and send them flying off the screen. (It’s clearly some sort of special ghost ball, though, as it passes through the white ball safely.)

That’s pretty much the game. Each level ends after 20 seconds or so (even if there are brown balls in mid-attack, which can be a life-saver), whereupon you can use the points you’ve earned to buy upgrades like a faster or bigger yellow ball, a larger circle, or a bigger – and therefore heavier and harder to dislodge – white ball. But as with so many great arcade games, the genius in Finger Sling lies in the balance between risk and reward.

This is because you get more points the harder you send the enemy balls flying. Carefully and gently interpose your yellow ball between them and the target and they’ll be deflected safely away, but you’ll score a measly one or two points. But upgrade a bit and smash into them from the whole width of the screen and you can notch 100+ from a single hit, and with a satisfyingly loud BANG instead of the usual gentle clack of ball-on-ball. So you’re constantly being tempted by your own greed and impatience (as well as the OpenFeint leaderboard) to play in a much more reckless, risky but richly rewarding manner. You’re your own worst enemy, and who knows your weaknesses and vulnerabilities better than you do?

I could go on with all sorts of observations and tactical tips and suchlike, but I’ve already told you everything you really need to know and since the game’s free you might as well go and find out for yourself, no? My high score is 232,026.

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