Super QuickHook Review

Super QuickHook is a sequel to Hook Champ, which had you playing as an explorer traversing caves with a grappling hook and other powerups collecting riches and trying to stay alive. Super QuickHook largely expands and refines its predecessor's concepts and controls, to the point where the game has become one of the best gaming experiences I have ever had on the iPhone.

Super QuickHook is all about swinging from your grappling hook to progress through the levels, although you also have limited-use rocket boots and a ground sliding ability to help you navigate the levels quickly. Unlike in Hook Champ, you have unlimited lives and aren't being chased by anything in the adventure levels, so you can experiment with exploring the levels at your own pace, and the game takes advantage of this by adding objectives to collect all the coins in a level and to find various secrets, as well as to top the developer's score, which requires both speedy completion times and the amassing of most if not all the coins in a level.

But what makes Super QuickHook really shine is its addictive new Avalanche mode, which has you trying to outrun an oncoming avalanche for as long as you can. This new endless mode is similar to Canabalt with over 60 level sections that appear randomly as you play. It behooves you to recognize when you are in a particular section, as coins are always present in the same locations, and you need the points the coins provide if you're trying to set high scores.

The grappling controls work exceptionally - you tap on the screen to fire a grappling hook in that direction, or on the side of the screen to fire a 45 degree rope in that direction. Super QuickHook features a fantastic graphical and musical style inspired by the 16-bit era of gaming, and you will see and hear elements that recall some of the great games of that time period. OpenFeint is integrated into the game's interface, allowing you to see global and friends leaderboards from within the game itself, and to challenge your friends to asynchronous ghost races. The only additional OpenFeint features I'd like to see would be the ability to race the ghost of anyone on the leaderboards, and cloud-based save syncing between devices.

But those are literally my only complaints about Super QuickHook. Rocketcat Games has refined the foundation that Hook Champ laid down into something truly wonderful with Super QuickHook. This is the kind of game that you pick up to play for a couple of minutes, then a couple more, then all of a sudden it's 3:00am and your battery is on its last throes. This is the kind of game you evangelize to all your friends to go out and buy at this very instant, as I believe you should do as well. Everything about this game comes together to form a near perfect package, and one that deserves to be in the pantheon of all-time great iPhone games.