Review of Castle of Magic for the iPhone and iPod Touch

Castle of Magic is a platformer in the style some readers may remember in the days of Sega Genesis. As with some of those classic Genesis games, the fact that it is designed with bright colors cartoonish graphics does not mean that this game is made for children. It's both clever and fun but succumbs frequently to the fatal flaw of all platformers I have tried on the iPhone/iPod, and that is a mistake-prone on-screen control scheme.

Graphics & Animation
Though the graphical style of the game felt like a throwback to classic platformers on the Genesis, that is not intended as a criticism. The graphics on this game are very good from the perspective of iPhone/iPod games. The characters, enemies and bosses are very well animated and the bright coloration give the game its intended sense of lighthearted fun. The dialog is clever without becoming too cute. In fact, to me this game continuously feels like something I've played before many years past - but in a good, nostaligic way (as opposed to a been there done that way).

Level Selection

Candy Level

Fighting a Boss

Controls
Controls seem to be the doom of so many good iPhone/iPod games. This game uses the on screen touchpad (left hand) and buttons (right hand) that has become commonplace. The first game I purchased that used this control scheme was iDracula (I believe) and I initially thought it was a good solution for the lack of controls. However, at this point, I have to admit, I hate this control scheme. It worked for iDracula because precision wasn't very important in that game. In most platformers it is.

The result, in many cases, is that platformers become either too difficult and frustrating on more advanced stages (for example, Sonic the Hedgehog) or they comensate for the innaccuracies of the controls by being a little too easy. The latter is the case in Castle of Magic. To overcome the inaccurate controls when jumping, the designers added a glide you can activate on any jump. This often means you can skip huge swaths of a level by jumping from a high point and gliding across. This fact does not mean you won't encounter many occasions where the inaccurate control scheme causes you many unnecessary deaths and much frustration. For these cases, you tend to have a ton of lives (but dying needlessly and repeatedly due to poor controls is never fun).

The Bad
Truly, beyond the control scheme issues discussed above, I don't have many issues with the game. I would argue that perhaps the story is pretty thin but that's kind of par for the course with this type of game.

The Good
The game is generally fun and clever. There are quite a few levels with some variety in "terrain" (i.e candy, ice, etc) and there are also related "power-ups." You'll move along pretty well since the game isn't that difficult. It does a good job of dropping in checkpoints and saving after each level to make it easy enough to play this game in short spurts (as I find I do with most iPhone/iPod games).

Overall
This game is more than worth the $1.99 asking price (it was $4.99 when I purchased it, but I'd still have given it an endorsement, perhaps slightly less so, at that price) and has a free version you can try if you're curious. Its probably not a game you'd replay much, if at all, but as I mentioned there are plenty of levels so you'll have more than enough gameplay for the money.