Trace

by Eric March on October 25, 2008 at 2:24 pm

(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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App Name: Trace
Developer: Kevin Calderone
Category: Platform Games

Taking its cue from the likes of such Flash games as Line Rider, Coaster Rider, Draw Play, and loads of other variants, Trace is another drawing game where the object is to draw your own path from point A to point B while avoiding obstacles and navigating existing platforms.

Graphically it’s pretty simple — but such drawing games are generally intended to be, since they’re all meant to resemble chalk or crayon or pencil drawings.  Trace is no different, looking like simple marker or pencil crayon drawings by a 4-year-old.  The sound is simple but cool — the background music is retrotastic.  The gameplay is similarly easy: Draw lines up and around obstacles wherever possible, then use the arrow keys (left) and jump button (right triangle) to navigate your drawing.  You can erase lines you’ve drawn if you don’t like where you put them, and there are buttons to restart a level or go back to the main menu. (These last two buttons must be double-tapped, which is a good idea since it avoids accidental taps.)

There are a grand total of 120 levels in this game, split amongst 6 themed worlds (paint, water, plant, chalk, flame and space), and the game keeps track of your progress throughout each world, including completion time, so you can quit at any time and know exactly where you left off, or challenge levels you’ve already completed to see if you can get a better time.  That adds up to a whole lotta fun gameplay.

There are some slight clipping issues here — you can get momentarily stuck on structures and fall through cracks you’d think would be too small to fall through, but these issues are pretty easily avoided, and to be honest, in playing through a whack of levels it never really presented much of a problem at all.  I mention it only because I like to be thorough.

Overall, Trace is a whole lotta fun, and if it seems just a tad primitive even by the genre’s standards, it can be forgiven for having loads of levels and plenty of fun packed in.

One thing — and this isn’t against Kevin personally — but developers really need to either come to a uniform consensus on which way you should rotate your device for landscape play, or allow the game to be played in either left or right orientation automatically.  For what it’s worth, Trace expects you to rotate to the right.

Anyway, despite its minor faults, I really like Trace, and being completely free is cream cheese icing on the carrot cake (and if you haven’t tried that, you’re missing out on sweet, sweet sex on a platter), so I’m going to have to give this one 5 stars and the guitar riff from Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water.

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Posted in Games: Casual, Games: Platform