Overall rating 5 / 5
Paper Dash is a paperboy clone, and if you recognize that game by its name, you are already one of my favorite people on the internet. For the others (don’t look at me like that), paperboy was an excellent NES game in which you delivered paper to a certain street while riding your bike. You had to avoid these obstacles that would try to trip you up – everything ranging from a dog to a running man to a tricycle. You got 1 point for delivering papers to the doorstep, and 5 points if you managed to precision-throw it into a mailbox. Any people you failed to deliver papers to would cancel their subscription. Avoiding obstacles was pretty hard, and getting papers precisely into mailboxes was harder still.
Paperdash gameplay screenshot: The character can be customised to your taste, and it is pretty easy to hit those little mailboxes with paper.
Which is why, you can probably guess by now, I like Paper Dash so much. For one, it improves on the graphics. Secondly, the game is silky smooth. No jitters or stutters in this gameplay. Third, the controls are tilt controls, and not touch controls. They are a bit wobbly, but you can get over that. Suggestion to the dev: if you provide a tiny indicator – like I love katamari does – showing the tilt state of the phone, it would be very helpful. You fling the papers into the mailboxes only – in this game – and get $0.25 for each successful throw. You get charged two dollars if you break a window, and you make $1 picking up beverage cans and $2 for each bottle. I think that this reward distribution is a bit unfair. I guess, if you want to shed light on the pitiful wages in the fourth estate – giving more reward for picking of coke cans might be one way of doing it.
The level selection screens are nice. There are two cities – I guess – paperbury and papertown. Thus names, perhaps, because every household in those places wants paper delivered to them. Each such city has three neighborhoods, and each neighborhood has around 6 levels, of varying difficulty. The last level in each neighborhood seems to be extra hard, requiring deft manipulation to avoid all the obstacles, and sometimes hitting dogs with paper. You have to deliver papers to at least 50% of the houses in each level to progress to the next region. This was a little confusing to me, because in the level selection map, the indicators came up in different colors – yellow, orange and red. And there was no indication that it was because of the presence of some of these red indicators that I could not progress onto the next stage.
To sum up, Paper Dash is an excellent game. It features a wide variety of obstacles – from bearded men to barking dogs. Some of the levels are devilishly tricky. It adds to the PaperBoy idea by providing different neighborhoods with different look and feels. The ad control, though active during gameplay, is completely unobtrusive. The game is adequately paced, and the only fault is that the the tilt controls take some getting used to. I highly recommend this. Score: 5/5
Paper Dash is available from the zune marketplace.
