Rooms of Doom review
:: CROSSY WARIOPrice: Free
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App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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Since Crossy Roadhit the App Store, tons of other games tried to find their own success by imitating it. Rooms of Doomhappens to be one of the games in the ever-expanding list of Crossy-likes, and it tries to differentiate itself by adding a bit of WarioWare-style variety to the mix. The only problem here is that it doesn't quite go far enough with the idea to feel special.
Endless doom
At its core, Rooms of Doomis an endless runner. You control a variety of lab experiment animals (e.g. a rabbit crossed with a turtle, a penguin with antlers, etc.) as they go through test chambers completing absurd tasks.
These tasks vary from room to room, so one minute you may be switching directions on a conveyor belt to avoid being punched by a robot and the next you're using paper wings to fly Flappy Bird-style through a sewer full of slimy obstacles. No matter what room you find yourself in though, you'll only have to use simple one tap controls.
Room for advancement
When you first start playing Rooms of Doom, you'll only have a few rooms and a couple characters to play around with. As you go though, you'll unlock new rooms and characters, which definitely help keep the game interesting.
Some of the new rooms really change what you'll need to focus on to survive, and some characters have special abilities that make some rooms easier, while others just have score multipliers that help you unlock new rooms faster.
Experiment gone wrong
The idea of an endless WarioWare-style game is totally great, but Rooms of Doom doesn't offer enough variety to hit that mark. Yes, there are different rooms and different characters that change things up to a certain extent, but even after grinding out a good number of unlocks, characters and rooms feel more like variations on a theme rather than truly different experiences.
Part of this has to do with the fact that unlocking can get really boring, particularly considering you can get duplicates of rooms and characters, which "levels" them up in some pretty uninteresting ways. More than that though, with every room being centered around using one tap controls to progress through it, the variety that Rooms of Doom presents is actually quite thin.
The bottom line
As far as endless runners go, Rooms of Doomis fine. It does what endless runners do without too many problems. The only real issue with it is that its attempt at shaking up the tried-and-true formula is only skin deep.