Save your human owner from peril in ‘Buster and the Crystal Bones’
If you’re looking for a new take on the platformer genre, there’s a game out on the App Store now that lets you take on the niche as a dog. In Buster and the Crystal Bones, you’ll run and jump your way to save your master, a professor who has been kidnapped by an evil fiend. Your task, as Buster the Dog Adventurer, is to collect the Crystal Bones in order to save your best human friend.
Along the way, you’ll break open crates and barrels to find bones to collect, jump over ditches and from platform to platform in rivers, and try to avoid nasty creatures that will bite you. At the end of each level, you’ll find a crystal bone that will get you one step closer to saving your master.
Buster and the Crystal Bones is a fun game to play, but there are some idiosyncrasies that take some getting used to and make the game slightly annoying at first. If you forget to take your finger off the jump button, for example, Buster will continue leaping even when you don’t want him to. It makes for a good way to plunge straight into a crevasse when you don’t intend to do so.
The controls are also finicky in other ways. Lifting your finger off the move button should result in Buster stopping immediately, but in fact he continues forward a step or two before coming to a stop. In a sense, this is probably more realistic, given the idea of momentum. I found that a quick stop could be achieved with a swipe backwards, and my ability to keep Buster where I wanted him got much better after that realization.
Buster and the Crystal Bones is a fun time passer, once you get used to the controls. You can download Buster and the Crystal Bones on the App Store for $1.99.