Frankenfoods Review: It’s Alive! (and Fun)

Frankenfoods is about as much of an old-school experience as you can find on the iOS App Store. It’s a tiny, pixelated game requiring a tidbit of strategy and a lot of patience. It’s tough, it’s unforgiving, but it’s never …

By
Share this
  • Share this on Facebook
  • Share this on Twitter

Frankenfoods is about as much of an old-school experience as you can find on the iOS App Store. It’s a tiny, pixelated game requiring a tidbit of strategy and a lot of patience. It’s tough, it’s unforgiving, but it’s never impossible and usually always fun.

The protagonist, who I assume is Dr. Frankenfood, has found himself trapped in a laboratory that’s filled with food monsters who are craving some Frankenfood flesh. As a helpless scientist, you must run from your creations, using the traps scattered throughout the levels to dispose of the monsters. Frankenfoods is turn-based and the monsters always move towards you, so you are required to use this predictability to lure the monsters into a trap, or into another monster which will daze (and sometimes kill) both parties.

Frankenfoods Review
Sometimes it’s best to just hide in a fortified corner and wait for the monsters to hit the traps on their way to you. Just don’t trap yourself!

Some monsters behave differently than others do, so learning the monsters’ movement patterns is part of the strategy that you’ll need to employ each time you pick up the game to play. At the start of each level, you, the monsters, and the traps are randomly placed throughout the levels, so each playthrough is a bit different than the last, even when repeating levels.

There are no lives in Frankenfoods. You get one shot to get as far as you can, and once you die it’s back to the beginning. The lack of lives adds some needed intensity to an otherwise slow-paced game.

You can pick up power-ups found in chests along the way which give you abilities like randomly teleporting to another tile or instantly killing enemies in tiles around you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etyscW50NRQ&spfreload=10

The few times where I was genuinely frustrated at the game had to do with the game’s placement of Dr. Frankenfood at the start of a level. You’re almost always spawned in a corner, and occasionally there are more enemies around you than obstacles. You never want to corner yourself, but later on in the game once the enemy numbers have thinned out, it’s okay to venture into a corner to try and scrape off some baddies on some bombs or trap doors. However, when corned at the start of a level, it’s really hard to escape when all the bad guys are quickly converging on your location, and there is very little to take shelter behind.

Frankenfoods is one of those games that you’ll either be really into, or not interested in much at all. There’s little action taking place in the game, and you spend the entire game running away, but it’s in the running away where the game’s strategy lies. Frankenfoods is a fun little mobile game that fans of classic arcade games are sure to enjoy, and with a low entry fee ($0.99) if it looks even remotely entertaining to you, I recommend giving it a shot.

The good

  • Randomly generated levels keep things fresh.
  • Highly appealing to arcade game enthusiasts.

The bad

  • Sometimes random level generation makes things a bit too tough.
80 out of 100
Former Good Morning America child star, Tom spends his time these days writing lots of things for people to read. He's a fan of independently developed video games, and always roots for the underdog. Send him animated .gifs on Twitter: @tomscott90. He likes those things