Lucky Frame is back – with a brand new game. After the awards, amazing reviews, nominations, plaudits, acclaim and general awestruck wonder that the company’s previous title, Bad Hotel picked up, Lucky Frame has refused categorically to rest upon it’s rainbow-hued laurels. The steely-eyed outfit has instead forced it’s development gnomes back down the software mine and whipped them into frantic effort to puck the choicest and most stylish nuggets of lovely from the bleak, searing darkness of ‘a mile below’.
Wave Trip is another original. Whereas Pugs Luv Beats challenged you to harvest musical beets with idiosyncratically costumed pug dogs and Bad Hotel demanded that you build and defend a (competitively priced) hotel from swarms and waves of birds, yeti and an apocalyptically angry Texan developer, Wave Trip does something a little bit different.
In Wave Trip, players must rescue their tiny and ever so cute friends from the confines of a scary bubble, by collecting keys while, at the same, time, generating cool beats and dope loops by picking up sound tokens and building their multiplier to Kraftwerkian levels of audiawesome marvellous.
It is, at heart, jolly simple. Your teflon-coated, low radar profile, stealthy protagonist starts at the right hand side of the screen. Upon initiation of the level, she flies to the right. Your right hand controls height. Press to descend, release to rise like a soap bubble of righteous anger. Your left hand triggers a shield of impenetrable armour, which can be used to blast meanies out of your path.
By a dextrous combination of nifty flying and judiciously placed shield blasts, you zip through a level, picking up keys, sound tokens, freeing your imprisoned colleagues and generating a medley of toe-tapping music and accruing points like a vampire in a pencil factory.
And of course, this being a Lucky Frame game, that’s by no means all. There’s also a level editor, wherein players can build and share their own challenging experiences and thrill-a-minute levels.
Wave Trip is what would happen if you fired Brian Eno and Peter Molyneux through the Large Hadron Collider on a collision course and then scraped the resulting residue onto an iPad. Magic.
Wave Trip is out now for iPad, iPhone and iPod. You can – and should – buy it now for £1.49/€1.59/$1.99.
