The game resembles an endless runner, but is actually a challenge based platformer with set levels. Each level has you collecting gold and rockets. Rockets boost your speed, and there are always 35 nuggets of gold to find, though those are split among small nuggets worth one, and large nuggets worth five. Rather than a conventional three star rating system, you’re rated on your ability to collect every nugget and rocket, and must collect all in a single run for the perfect rating. This is especially challenging, as rockets really boost you along and add a great sense of speed.
Mixing things up level to level are platforms that launch you into long jumps, and the gravity stuff. Levels are mostly full pipe tunnels that you easily rotate around, jumping to avoid lava pits and collect goodies along the way. There are also 2-D side-scrolling sections to mix things up. This presents some unique platforming challenges that challenge your perceptions, but it gets even worse with the gravity switching panels and rings that mirror the controls and reverse gravity. With all the lava and strange gravity anomalies, we must be somewhere in the center of the earth or something.
Speaking of lava; there is a lot of it. Throughout the game’s 32 levels, you’ll only encounter that one type of environment, and it gets tiresome. It’s hard to complain about one to two dollar games not having enough content without sounding entitled, but the game does feel a bit lacking. Despite the cool mechanics and responsive controls, it just feels like the game needs something more. Regardless, what we do have here is a fairly polished game that is easy to play, but hard to master. Although, I do have to note that some levels have very buggy sections that kill your dwarf for no reason. It definitely deserves some attention for everything it does right, though. If a new level set can be added in future updates along with bug fixes, the game will be a must buy. Greedy Dwarf is a two dollar iOS Universal game, on sale for one dollar at the time of this review.
