5 Minutes To Kill Yourself for iPhone Review
What’s it all about?
Adult Swim is making quite a name for themselves with their App Store offerings as of late. With games like Robot Unicorn Attack making their way to the top spots on the sellers lists, Adult Swim may have found a better home for their games than even the Flash sites they originate on. Another Adult Swim offering that came out a while before Robot Unicorn Attack and is still selling great is 5 Minutes To Kill Yourself.
The title itself is humorous enough, but once you put some serious time in with the game you’ll realize that it’s that kind of humor that gives the game its charm. The point of the entire game, as the name implies, is to die. Going completely against everything you’ve ever known about videogames, in 5MTKY you must die as quickly as possible.
Your character, an office employee, has simply had enough of life (we’ve all been there), and must find creative ways to end his life within 5 minutes. There are objects scattered all around the world that you can use to assist you on your way to meeting your maker. You can grab scissors and staplers off of people’s desks and carve up your face and body, you can slam yourself in a copy machine, or even take a few gulps of a mop bucket. Each of these actions takes a little bit off your life bar, and once you have reached your limit your character will collapse, dead, and your game is over.
The key to the game is finding out the best ways to end the life of your character. A stapler, for example, doesn’t do as much damage as something like, say, a paper shredder to the face. If you can find a nice stash of highly-damaging objects you’ll be able to set new personal records, and then attempt to break those later on.
Graphics, Audio and Verdict
With a game like 5 Minute To Kill Yourself presentation is everything. The most enjoyable aspect of the game is watching your simple office worker mauling himself with everything in sight. Adult Swim has done a great job in this respect, and the game looks at least as good as its original version which was rendered in Flash on the Adult Swim website. The game is presented in a 3/4 isometric point of view and is controlled by touching areas of the screen. It’s extremely simple, and you can activate any of the objects in the world simply by touching them.
The game has a constant, high-tension action movie soundtrack present throughout. This adds a nice sense of urgency to the gameplay, above and beyond your time limit for killing yourself. Smacking yourself up with different objects produces subtle sound effects and gaining points by destroying yourself does the same. Adult Swim games seem to be setting a nice bar in terms of iPhone game soundtracks, and 5MTKY contributes to that trend nicely.
At $1.99, 5 Minutes To Kill Yourself is a bit more pricey than other iPhone hits like Angry Birds, but in the end it’s still just two bucks. The game has production values that are rare in the App Store, and it will certainly keep you busy for hours. The Adult Swim premium price is easily overlooked for awesome mobile experiences like 5 Minutes To Kill Yourself.
