What do you imagine is normal for a day in the life of a cartoon caveman? Well if Hungry Dan by Firal Interactive is any indicator, it’s an endless hunt for meat while climbing a rather peculiar set of bones.
Hungry Dan is the type of mobile game that I love to play. The mechanics are insanely simple, you probably won’t be playing for more than a couple of minutes per session, but it’s always fun to try again to beat your high score.
Like I said, the premise of Hungry Dan is a simple one. You are a caveman. You want meat. Dan endlessly climbs up two columns of vertebrae, collecting floating steaks while dodging protruding rib bones and random little dinosaurs that are trying to climb down. Dan can be in one of four positions on the screen: outer left, center left, center right, and outer right. All you do is swipe the screen left or right to move Dan over to the next position. If you bump your head into an obstacle or try to grab onto a skinny section of bone, it’s game over.
While it sees like the main premise of Dan is always just to try and beat your high score, there are a lot of little touches that I appreciated the game having. For starters, each time you play you’re given a mission in the top left corner. These can range from things like collecting a certain amount of steaks to simply changing positions enough times in a single run. My only problem with these is that they’re displayed with a simple picture, and in certain cases I found myself unsure of what my mission actually was.
The visuals of the game are pretty nice. I often found myself smiling at the charm of Dan as a character and even the mini dinosaurs are pretty cute. The soundtrack is decent, but I think it gets a little repetitive at times.
If I had to give one major complaint towards Hungry Dan, it’s in the unlockable characters. The game has a surprisingly high amount of playable characters, but with only one exception, they aren’t so much unlockable as they are purchasable. Every character will cost you ninety nine cents to play as except for one you can get via social media. I didn’t buy any of these characters, but I assume the difference is purely cosmetic. This was a bit disappointing to me, as the steaks you collect while playing do add up, so it would have been nice to be able to spend those to unlock some of the characters instead of real money.
Hungry Dan is a really simple, fairly charming free to play mobile game. I certainly recommend giving it a shot, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t hold your attention for too long.
