kurukuru kururin Review

Here we go with the first of our Gameboy Advance reviews, this one is for an oddly named game, kurukuru kururin. The object of the game is to navigate your helicopter through varying worlds to rescue your brothers and sisters, who are some sort of duck creatures or whatever they are, these Japanese people come up with some odd looking creatures at times!

Anyway, each of these worlds are separated by levels all of which are designed as mazes, which require you to manoeuvre your helicopter through them as quickly as possible without touching the walls. The levels start off very easy with the corridors wide and the mazes not very complex but they soon degrade into stupidly hard mazes where your have no chance to find your way through without studying the map first and plotting your required journey.

The complexity of the mazes is mirrored in the corridors you are required to navigate your helicopter through, the corridors gets increasingly small and narrow with space to manoeuvre sometimes at a premium, not to mention the added problem of on screen enemies in the form of mines, pistons and other nasties.

To help you through the ever increasingly complex mazes is a handy demo mode and practice mode, the practice mode allows you to try any level you have successfully completed and the current level your on, this allows you to hone your skills on these levels so when it comes down to the crunch you can complete the level perfectly. Demo mode on the other hand allows you to watch the perfect route through the level, this allows you to see which route is the best route plus which areas can be used as shortcuts to make your time even quicker.

There is nothing to help you through any of these levels, its you versus the world in this game, you do occasionally come across icons you can pick up but these only server to spice up your helicopters blades turning them from a stupidly dull blue to an array of shapes, colours and styles. You do feel inclined to collect these little icons even though at the end of the day they may be located in the worst of places and don't really mean anything.

The game does have other modes you can test your skill on, there is a challenge mode where you are given levels to go through with nothing more to get you going other than trying to get your helicopter from start to finish in the shortest time and without hitting the walls, which indecently gives you a star rating on the level plus the satisfaction of completing something you have very little chance of doing.

The adventure mode levels, like the challenge levels are governed by time, you usually end up third on the time rating but sometimes you just know you can do better and this is one of the things that draws you back to the game. You are always after the prefect time plus the star rating, which shows off your skill at completing the level.

The in-game graphics are very bright and colourful, the game does not push the GBA to its limits nor look impressive in any way but it is amazingly addictive and you simply cannot put it down, nothing comes close to the feeling you get on completion of a level. The learning curve is very low and the levels are very varied in their design and the graphics for each of the worlds are very different so you will never come across the same level twice, which in some way is also a god send as you really could not deal with some of the levels twice once they are completed!

Overall kurukuru kururin is a great game and I recommend it to anyone who has a Gameboy Advance.