If you’ve every played through a blast barrel level in a Donkey Kong Country game and thought “Man, I wish there were more of these,” Bullet Boy is more of those.
Available now for iOS and Android (yay!) from Pomelo Games, Bullet Boy takes a mechanic that console platformers generally use sparingly and dials it up to eleven, much like my microphone game in the opening moments of the video above. It’s been a month, I’m a bit rusty.
It’s like a training ground for the big leagues—the next time I come across barrel puzzles in a console game I shall place my hands on my sides and let out a hearty laugh. I will then fail because I put down my controller. Damn my hubris.
From the game’s App Store description:
The coolest game you’ll play this year!
An incredibly fun adventure across a floating world, where you fire yourself out of powerful cannons!
Meet Bullet Boy, the courageous kid who rushes to escape a deadly tornado, while he tries to collect the missing pieces of some very mysterious, and fascinating statues.
Packed with highly dynamic mechanics. Avoid birds, buildings and weird machines, tap rapidly to dodge fast-moving obstacles, aim precisely to get to the next cannon, or shoot to the sky to elude multiple obstacles altogether, and quickly get to your goal!
You’ll spend hours engaged in the action and the challenge of lots of levels, with randomly generated sections, and exciting progression along the whole game.
Unlock awesome power-ups to increase the fun and the possibilities of blasting your way through this peculiar and beautiful world.
Best of all, Bullet Boy is a free-to-play game that isn’t particularly greedy about it, and we all love free-to-play games.
The First Five is the first five minutes of a game with light commentary. Once the five minutes are up, so am I.
Contact the author at fahey@kotaku.com or follow him on Twitter at @bunnyspatial