Basket Fall is Weirdness in All the Right Ways

When you strip down your gameplay to basic, quick, high-score driven fun, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from the Flappy Birds and Ketchapp Games of the world. Kumobius’ plan is to get weird. At least, that’s my …

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When you strip down your gameplay to basic, quick, high-score driven fun, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from the Flappy Birds and Ketchapp Games of the world.

Kumobius’ plan is to get weird.

At least, that’s my impression of Basket Fall. The latest game from the developer of Bean Dreams, Time Surfer and Duet, Basket Fall is a game that asks you to nail a high score by completing one simple task: sink the basketball in the hoop …or maybe the corn in the popcorn machine. …or the coconut between the Yogi’s posing arms.

See? Weird.

What they’ve done here is actually quite clever. Rather than drip-feeding new characters (a la Crossy Road), Basket Fall lets players spend their coins to unlock new themes that completely re-skin the experience, each one seemingly stranger than the last. If anything, I can’t help but feel their art lead quietly challenged himself to make stages that would feel at home in a WarioWare collection.

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hese skins don’t affect the gameplay (from what we can tell), but never fail to add plenty of charm to this otherwise simplistic experience. Getting the ball in the basket is a challenge, of course. For the most part, it’s swinging on a pendulum above the goal, and you’ll need to cut the rope at just the right time. We’ve encountered one incidence where the ball remained stationary while the goal moved, however, so there’s a chance that things will get shaken up the higher you score.

Basket Fall will be available as a free download on the App Store when it launches this Thursday, January 7th.

Jim Squires is the Editor-in-Chief of Gamezebo. Everything you see passes his eyes first, so we like to think of him as "the gatekeeper of cool stuff." He likes good games, great writing, and just can't say no to a hamburger. Also, he is not a bear.