I must confess that the driving force behind my desire to review The Mystical Woods Of Darkness was the developer’s comparison of this game to a venerable Sega Genesis classic: Castle Of Illusion.  Those were the glory days of Disney gaming, so there are some pretty big ears to fill.  The spirit is definitely there in Mystical Woods, but the execution leaves a little to be desired.  What has the potential to be a strong platform game is currently choppy and somewhat awkward to control.

The story is fantasy cliché to the hilt – land is overrun with darkness, the evil creatures have taken over, and you are the only hope to restore peace to the land.  Okay, at least we know where we are going.  You play a young witch who must work her way somewhere to defeat the ultimate evil.  To aid you in your quest you can jump on the bad guys’ heads to kill them or wave your wand at them the “poof” them away.  The problem is that both of these actions are problematic as far as the controls are concerned.  The jump button often gets stuck, though correcting the issue is usually as simple as pressing the jump button again.  The wand button seems to have a bit of a delay to it, but the delay doesn’t seem to be the same amount of time in all cases.  Personally, I’m not sure why this isn’t instantaneous.

I also think there are issues with how the game determines a collision between your character and the enemies.  Often times you’ll jump to get over a bad guy’s head and suddenly start flashing to indicate you’ve been hit, even though it never looked like you hit the bad guy.  The most likely cause for this problem is beyond the scope of this review (and would probably be boring to most of you), but it’s an issue none the less that will be readily apparent to anyone playing the game.  There are no pause or save options in the game.  The levels are fairly short, and the load times too long given the length of the levels.  There are diamonds to collect, though I’m not sure what they do.  You can start the game on easy (5 apples for life) or hard (3 apples for life) and so far I haven’t seen any indication that you can get an apple back once you’ve lost it.

The graphics are a bit of a mixed bag.  None of them are particularly bad, but a lot of the individual elements don’t seem to jive with each other.  The main character, the evil bunnies and the owls stand out as higher quality than the rest of the visuals.  Animation is minimal, and some things like your character jumping look very stiff and unnatural.  The sound effects, while nothing out of the ordinary, are actually pretty decent.  The music is good, but there doesn’t seem to be much length to it before the track starts looping.

I’m really torn on how to rate this game.  Based on everything I’ve listed above, I’d normally give such a game a Not Recommended.  However, there’s something about this one in particular that leads me to believe that it really is going to get better.  Of course, it would help if the developer read the review carefully and took a lot of my suggestions to heart.  Either way, I hope I’m not wrong in believing that where this game is head is going to be a big improvement of where it is now.  We need more decent platform games for the iPhone.

Final Verdict: On The Fence
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