Tuokio Inc
£0.69 on Apple iOS
This game wins stars on its description alone.
You play as Steve Snaps, the “hero programmer” of Slavetech who has pulled an all-nighter. An ill-timed blue screen after a long day triggers an explosive rage and Steve Snaps (geddit?) The game is billed to encourage stress relieving creative destruction and allow you to “rage against the machines”.
You have one minute, as the chest-heaving, rage-filled Steve, to smash the office with a golf club. You get bonuses for certain types of destructive combos, like smashing three monitors in a row or three photocopiers (doesn’t that just take you back?) Aptly, smashing the photocopiers gets you a higher bonus than destroying computer monitors.
The game has a number of simple and quick tutorials to run you through the its various points, such as combos, bonuses for things like smashing water coolers, coin collecting (presumably from amongst the ruins of your colleagues’ desks) which can buy you power up drinks for more retributive behaviour correction, and power ups that do various things like freeze time or speed up Steve Snaps’ movement.
These speed bonuses also happen periodically and they’re like some kind of beautiful dance – Steve pirouettes, hailing down destruction upon the
inanimate office objects around him while soothing music plays in accompaniment.
When you’re in normal mode, the music is ’90s rock-styles, and the game is set in the mid-90s corporate world, with grey cubicle partitions and old school Macs. Alternatively, if your company has been putting off those equipment upgrades for a while, this could be very similar to your current office environment.
However much the decor may or may not match your actual office environment, the emotions and enjoyment released when watching Steve “get some work done” by breaking an entire office into very small pieces do match up. If you’ve ever had an especially frustrating time at work, or you’ve cleared Tray Three four times (warning: contains explicit language), you’ll enjoy the vicarious, and above all, completely legal, fun of showing the photocopier exactly who’s boss a la Office Space.
The game is fun and simple to play, but the controls are sticky with the scroll wheel being quite small, which is good in terms of screen size, but bad in terms of trying to get Steve moving before the one minute timer runs out. The 90s rock wears thin pretty quickly, but the various manic groans and exhausted sighs from Steve’s avatar are pretty awesome.
The game costs £0.69 which doesn’t feel like too much to pay for a well-designed and pretty hilarious offering. The offices do change formation slightly as you progress and this is billed as a blitz-style arcade game, so chasing a high score is the goal, not progressing through levels – but it’d still be nice to see something new every once in a while.
