Arktyczne Polowanie

The Good
The graphics are nice

The Bad
The difficulty is wildly uneven

The Bottom Line
Arktyczne Polowanie is a simple action game where you try to hop from floe to floe to reach the level goal, all while enemies hop around and try to chase you down. The graphics are well-made and pleasant to the eye — the title screen is quite pretty, and the enemies (whatever they're supposed to be) are smoothly animated. The music isn't as good. The title screen music is not bad, but it sounds like it'd be more suited for a sci-fi shooter, not a comedic game about a fat penguin. As for the in-game music, it is pretty dull and repetitive... especially since you'll usually only hear the first 20 seconds of it, over and over.

Why? Well, this is because of the game's difficulty curve... which is nonexistent. On most of the levels, you can reach the goal with no problems, just make a beeline to the upper-right corner and you're done in less than half a minute. The enemies are typically far enough from you that they are a non-issue.

The rare moments of difficulty usually happen because the game, by pure chance, doesn't spawn any ice floes around your goal, forcing you to avoid the enemies while waiting for a path to show up. Since the ice floes appear and vanish apparently at random, sometimes you find yourself in a dead-end situation where you're stuck on an ice floe in the middle of water, and the only way out is blocked by an incoming enemy.

It's worth noting that your only weapon, the bombs, are useless. They take a moment to explode and only kill an enemy on the same ice floe — and the enemies' movements are unpredictable, so it's very difficult to kill any of them this way. What's more, the explosion destroys the floe, so you might end up cutting off your escape route.

So, the game plays like this: you effortlessly breeze through several levels, then the game unluckily spawns you with enemies right next to you and you die — just because of random chance. Then you breeze through the next several levels, then you stumble on a dead-end situation and die... To summarize, Arktyczne Polowanie has a good concept, but unfortunately the gameplay feels half-baked.