Follow the Bouncing Ball!

Mobile games, especially colorful ones made for kids are big business at the moment so with that open market there are so many that are trying to get a piece of the pie. With so many to choose from, you have to really nail the addictive qualities of a game but not make it so hard that your users will rage quit. I believe that balance is maintained in Rainbow Dash, but at a price.

Check out my stream of Rainbow Dash below:

It’s a very clean aesthetic with white backgrounds, and grey shapes that attain very bright colors when you bounce on them with the ball you control. It’s a sense of control and changing the world around you that gives even little kids the power they crave. Taking what was a drab world and making it into a color explosion will really speak to them on multiple levels, while also speaking interest in how to effectively hit every grey block. It’s a good draw that keeps the player coming back for more.

The colors themselves are extremely vibrant and play well with the white background, making it very pleasing to look at even for extended periods. Perhaps its best quality is the use of the hyper colorful after image of the ball so you can see where you have been and how fast you were going. It’s both informative and a feast for the eyes, and shows you how to do better next time.

While very pretty, the control scheme needs some serious work and because it’s an autoscroller, you would expect some modicum of control when you jump, but every jump is the exact same arc and power, and that arc is pretty high for most points. You do have a double jump, but without being able to feather the controls with the intensity of your press, it’s usually used as a last resort from losing. Also, while there is background music which is fairly catchy, it’s on a loop for the entire game, which makes you hate it after a while. Not to mention, even with this catchy music, it’s very off-putting to not have the best movement paths line up with the music, as that would be expected in a game of this nature.

Rainbow Dash is not a terrible game, but it’s not bringing anything truly new to the scene, and there’s a real limit on how long you can play it with its lack of music variation. But with children it should be a fair way to pass the time.