The Munchables review

It looks like a seizure and rhymes with a lunchtime snack, but look past that and The Munchables is… well, it’s still completely crazy underneath. When pirate aliens invade the planet of Star Ving – and let’s take a moment to absorb that truly awful pun – a couple of big toothy balls have to bounce around chomping everything under the sun.

This never starts to make sense, but it doesn’t take too long to work out what you’re supposed to be doing. It’s a riff on Katamari, only instead of rolling a big heap of junk around you’re munching aliens ’til your chosen ball grows as big as a house. This allows you to chow on monsters of a higher level before eventually moving on to the next world, where the whole edifying process begins all over again.

The actual chomping’s simple but undeniably fun, bolstered by a few special abilities, including one that lets you hoover up enemies. From the horribly catchy, horribly chirpy soundtrack to the head-hurting visuals, the Katamari influence is so clear this has almost no character of its own, but it can be really quite funny to behold.

Although it gets a bit repetitive, and there isn’t much to it, there’s something fascinating about a game that lets you eat and eat until you poo out a ‘Legendary Orb’.

Jun 22, 2009