App Review: Land-a-Panda
Land-a-Panda is this cute little game that I bought one day, thinking that I’ll only play it for a bit then forget about it, but it didn’t really matter because it was only a buck, and I was bored.
It turns out that Land-a-Panda is actually a genuinely fun and addicting game. It’s not particularly original or “break-through” but it has some great qualities. This game is a testament to why the App Store is so successful. First of all the only reason that I bought this app was because it cost less than I drop on, well, pretty well anything. Second, there was no downside. People always wonder how spending all this time and money on research and development only to sell the eventual product for one dollar could ever make a profit. But that is the beauty of the App Store. Unlike just about every other outlet to attain a game or any form of entertainment, you don’t have to stand there for hours contemplating whether it would be worth your hard-earned dollars to buy. You simply click the little "buy now" button, and it’s all good. There literally are no negative repercussions. So what I’m trying to say is that a game could be not so great, and still sell like hot cakes.
The thing with Land-a-Panda is that it’s not really anything fancy or intuitive or fresh, but it doesn’t need to be, because it only costs a dollar, thus it only has to live up to its low price. How can you complain about something, that in the first place is good, and only costs as much as a donut at Tim Horton’s, yet gives you potentially hours or entertainment?
Land-a-Panda is a sidescroller type game, in which you (a panda madly in love, named Yang Guang) leap across from barrel to barrel trying to get to the platform at the end which has your lover, Tian Tian, on it. Different barrels do different things, there are obstacles, and power-ups along the way to assist you. Each level also has three coins for you to try and get, which add to your score. There are a total of 80 levels that span over four unique worlds, with new levels promised in future updates. Each level is actually fairly addicting, and trying to get all the coins proves a big challenge in itself. This gives the game appeal to more hard-core “completionist” type gamers.
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