Luke the Liftboy Review

Euro 2012 has been and gone. Spain did the whole veni vidi vici in Poland and Ukraine. The swathes of people that came from all over Europe to the two host countries have enjoyed the sights and sounds of a great soccer football championship, but have long since left. So a game about getting European footie fans to the right floor of their hotel seems a little... late. Then again, Luke the Liftboy will ring just as apropos for France 2016, so best to have a review ready for then.

Also, it's a decent enough game. Luke the Liftboy distils the time management of Hotel Dash to getting people into an elevator and out of it at the right floor, but for all the simplicity it has a nice development curve through its 36 levels. As extra floors open up and the number of fans increase, all alongside the appearance of disasters like electric failures, fires, and the brashly high incidence of a hooligan wrecking the elevator, the play edges towards the thrill of being overwhelmed by the numbers, albeit never quite reaching there. It always feels like something is missing to really mix things up, but the evolutions throughout the game deflect well from this issue.

Still, the play would be much more fun if there were more things to unsettle the repetition. At its worst it feels like the routine of taking people where they want to go; Crazy Taxi this ain't. I'd prefer for something that Ukranian and Polish bellboys could relate to less. I'd also prefer it, speaking as an Englishman, if the game wasn't so mean about my country's history of hooliganism. The fan who likes to turn up and... leave a collection of various fluids in the elevator is an Englishman, yelling as he appears "Oi! England won the match? Let's have a riot!" It's all meant in good humor, but this alongside other caricatures are based on rather crude, unfair stereotypes and all of it seems generally unnecessary. Then again, this German=developed game does come some (accidentally) hilarious localization, so everyone comes out of this with egg on their face, which somehow makes it more OK.

It may be a good week too late for Euro 2012, but Luke the Liftboy is a solid bet to occupy an hour of that long wait between now and the start of the 2012/13 football season. Let's just hope Luke the Olympic Flame Carrier is a little more punctual.