No matter how long I go without shaving, I’m never able to trim myself a nice, twirly ‘tashe – rather, I just end up with a huge unkempt mess that makes me look like some kind of J. R. R. Tolkien creature.
No matter how long I go without shaving, I’m never able to trim myself a nice, twirly ‘tashe – rather, I just end up with a huge unkempt mess that makes me look like some kind of J. R. R. Tolkien creature.
I am, therefore, hugely jealous of the gentleman’s facial hair in The Twist. Not only is it long and very spiral-prone, but it can also catch money! The Twist isn’t perfect, but it’s a hugely unique and enjoyable pastime that will no doubt whittle away many a bus journey for moustache-lovers everywhere.
With his moustache at the ready, this gentleman is looking to steal as much cash as possible, while dodging the police at every corner. This involves you grabbing his facial hair from either side, and then drawing loops on the screen to trap floating money inside.
As you continue to draw, the moustache gets longer, and the number of loops and coins trapped in them grows. However, there are also police heads randomly roaming the screen, and if a policeman touches a moustache that you’ve drawn, either while you’re still drawing it, or when it is retracting back to the gentleman, then you lose all the coins that haven’t managed to be collected yet.
Essentially, it’s a case of balancing risk versus reward. Making multiple loops in a moustache will give you a larger and larger combo multiplier, but then you run the risk of being caught and losing it all anyway.
To add to this, there are damsels moving around the screen too, and when you draw a loop around these, you’re granted some extra time. When the clock runs out, your score and various stats are uploaded to a server, and ranked against other players around the world.
There isn’t much else to The Twist, but while it seems light on content at first, it soon becomes apparent where you’re going to spend most of your time – simply mucking around and experimenting with loops and drawings.
Messing around and trying to top the individual high score charts is pretty entertaining, and adds extra value to what could potentially be a one-trick pony. The online scores really give that added sense of replayability, making you want to have just one more go, in the hope of beating that player whose score has continued to elude you for far too long.
But The Twist needs more. Right now, you’ll most likely feel like you’ve seen it all within an hour, and some will be tired of the experience well before that. A new gameplay mode is on the way, according to the developer, but it would have been nice if this was already in place before the game was released.
The game is also a bit too luck-based, in the sense that coins, damsels and police appear randomly. This means that a lot of the time, you’re not actually able to beat your high scores, no matter how hard you try – for example, you might be chasing the “most damsels captured in a single game” award, but then enough damsels won’t appear for you to catch anyway!
Finally, the loop-drawing doesn’t always appear to work perfectly. I encountered numerous times when I’d draw a fourth, fifth or sixth loop to trap some coins, and the loop would not fill with grey to show it had worked, allowing the coin to keep on moving by.
You won’t find anything quite like The Twist on mobile right now, and once this title has been beefed up a little with extra content, it could potentially be a must-play. You can grab it now from the Google Play store.
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