Can Knockdown 2 | Life of Android

The Story

Any kid worth his or her salt has, at one time or another, lined up some cans and employed a variety of means to knock them down. For the record, Life of Android’s favourite method was to use a high velocity air rifle from a raise vantage point – a bedroom window or some such. Can Knockdown continues this grand tradition but does so in the sanitised confines of your smartphone and uses a ball, rather than sophisticated ballistics…

The Experience

Dead easy to explain, this one. Using the touchscreen you must hurl your ball at the arranged cans and knock down the all of them with a total of five balls. If you fail to knock down the whole arrangement with one ball, you’ll lose that ball from your arsenal on the next level, so you’ll need to learn the optimum spot at which to hit each set of cans on each level. Every few levels you’ll see bonus cans – explosives, extra balls, etc – that it pays to prioritise. And that’s just one game mode – there are two more: one that sees you trying to hit cans that fly up from the bottom of the screen and then drop down again within the time limit and another where you must hit wooden targets that appear in random locations on the screen.

The controls, as you’d expect are an absolute doddle to get to grips with. It’s just a case of figuring out how far up the screen you need to ‘flick’ your finger to launch the ball at the correct trajectory – too little height and you’ll miss the target altogether, too much and your ball will go soaring over the top and lose you a life. The difficulty level is spot on – tricky enough that you’ll need some practice before you can clear the first few levels, but not so hard that you get disheartened in ten minutes. It’s super-addictive and brilliantly put together. Even the game’s menu screen is a mini-game in its own right, with you having to hit the menu option with your ball in order to select it.

If you want to try before you buy, there’s the free version – Can Knockdown – available for free, but we’d urge you to spend on this one. Android Market needs more quality games like this. And fast.