iOS version
If there’s one thing we love in the gaming division at Windows Phone Central, it’s bringing our readers exclusive news about upcoming Xbox Live releases. Once again we have the scoop on this week’s new Xbox Live game: Little Acorns from Chillingo.
Little Acorns is a traditional 2D platformer starring a squirrel who reportedly enjoys acorns. In fact, the goal of each level is to recover all of your stolen acorns and then reach the exit. That’s just a ‘basic clear’ though. To fully clear the level, you must also gather five fruits that appear after the acorns have been collected plus finish under the speedrun time.
The fruits unlock clothing for your squirrel, and fully clearing levels also contributes to several Xbox Live Achievements. Speaking of which, several of the Achievements have extremely vague descriptions, so let’s hope they’re easy enough to figure out during gameplay.
Controls
One area of concern with mobile platformers is that of controls. With no physical d-pad or buttons to rely on, developers basically have to choose between either virtual or tilt controls. Mush recently used tilt controls quite effectively. Little Acorns however relies on touch-screen buttons for movement and jumping. Reportedly the controls work quite well on iOS, so they shouldn’t be much of a problem on Windows Phone either.
Priced
Little Acorns comes to Microsoft’s mobile platform with a disadvantage over the iPhone version, though: price. On iOS it has always cost 99 cents, but it will be $2.99 on Windows Phone. The higher price point is surprising given that Chillingo’s last game, physics puzzler Feed Me Oil launched on WP7 at 99 cents. Perhaps Feed Me Oil didn’t sell in large enough numbers to justify the higher price. I keep saying we have too many physics puzzlers on Xbox Live…
At any rate, Little Acorns should provide plenty of fun when it launches on Wednesday, August 15. With 80 levels and 3,000 acorns to find, that squirrel’s going to be busy!
