Funky Smugglers

In Funky Smugglers, all sorts of strange people will be passing through customs on the way to board their plane. Each person has all kinds of items in their possession, green objects which are acceptable and red ones which are banned. It's your job to grab the red objects to make sure no banned objects make it onto the plane. Safe objects include mugs, rubber ducks, apples and teddy bears. Banned objects include spiders, chainsaws, guns, grenades, scissors and plungers.

Grabbing a green object, or letting a red object through causes you to lose a life. Lose all three and it is game over. The level is clear when the quota of people board the plane. The levels aren't too different from one to the next, but you may find more objects to deal with or objects placed in more risky places like hands that obviously move and can pass over green objects. This means you have to time your grab else you will grab the wrong object and therefore lose a life.

You can make a combo by keeping hold of the object once you have grabbed it. Points are only accumulated once you drop/throw them way from the scanner. You can only hold on to the objects for a limited time, but can quickly release and catch them to reset the timer. This is strangely known as spinning. I'm unsure if it is harder to do on a touch-screen, but it didn't seem to add difficulty to the game using a mouse.

Power-ups known as Boosts adjust the tempo of the game and music. Rush speeds the game up, but there's a lack of green objects. Slow Motion slows it down, and it's easy to pick off the banned objects.

To keep things fresh, you have three active missions to work towards. There's all sorts of goals: to achieve a certain combo, throw items off a particular side of the scanner, to activate so many power-ups etc.

There's a Team Battle where your score combines with other players on that team, and the winning team is decided after the count-down has elapsed, with the promise of bonus coins if you win. The stupid thing is that you can see who is winning prior to choosing your team. The team battles just become one-sided so are rather pointless.

The graphics are sharp and the music is funky. Although replaying the game and hearing the same song on loop will have limited appeal. Overall, there's not much to Funky Smugglers. It's simplistic and takes too long to become challenging. When it does, it spikes in difficulty to the point where it seems a bit unfair and then you have to restart from the beginning. With the coins you earn, you can purchase all sorts of unlockables which is nice, and there is an upgrade to start the game at a higher level. You don't really get enough coins though, so to save up for that means you will have to delay purchasing the extra characters, backgrounds and music. That will mean the game will probably become repetitive faster.

I acquired the PC version via the Humble Bundle. It does seem to be free on Itunes, but 11-bit Studios' recommended vendor, Games Republic lists it for $9.99. Personally, I would imagine playing on a tablet device would be more fun than playing on a PC with mouse control, so getting the game for free sounds like a better deal to me.