Product Reviews

It may not have beaten polonium poisonings off the front pages, but SketchFighter generated a lot more pre-launch interest than your average shareware release. Courtesy of author Lars Gfvert and the small but perfectly formed publicity machine of Ambrosia Software, sneak peeks have been buzzing around the blogosphere for months, attracting plugs from Mac gaming sites and plaudits from the likes of Sony game design guru Raph Koster (raphkoster.com). Not bad for developer Lost Minds, which is run by a handful of geeks in their spare time.

So what's all the fuss about? The appeal lies in an aesthetic based on the sort of doodles you used to do in your exercise book when teacher was concentrating even less than you. Technically, SketchFighter is an action-adventure arcade game in which you pilot an Asteroids-style ship through a 2D map, avoiding enemies while solving puzzles and collecting tokens. The unique selling point is that all this is hand-drawn in black ink, and the style is maths class, not art class. At the start of each session, there's a rustle of paper as the background is hastily scrawled onto the screen, and then you're off, bumping your HB-outlined cruiser through the felt-tipped tunnels of a cross-hatched world.

There's something very zeitgeisty about this low-tech craft-box look, but Gfvert has played it endearingly straight - these are real doodles, not the arty reinterpretations of a Stefan Sagmeister or the punkish primitivism of a David Shrigley. There are also echoes of kitchen-sink animators such as Bob Godfrey (Roobarb and Custard), which makes it slightly unexpected that the graphics are static. Objects move, wiggle and rotate, but they don't squash or stretch; when you shoot enemies,

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they change colour rather than deform.

This sometimes left us wishing for a more tangible response, but maybe we're just greedy. The ship's control system is simple and effective, and the way it moves slightly too fast for comfort encourages you to hone your flying skills: it becomes a matter of pride not to bump into the walls. The enemies are varied and amusing - there can't be many games where you're harried by a dead seal - and leave satisfying smudges on the paper when they explode.

As well as the visuals, the standard components of videogaming have been stripped down. You don't score points or get extra lives: your health dwindles each time you're attacked or trip over the furniture, and zero is game over. The incentive to keep trying is to find out what's coming next. There's a large map of interconnecting worlds to discover, and SketchFighter has a remarkable ability to keep surprising you. We were hooked all the way to the end, which is further off than it seems, since you have to go back and complete an extra challenge.

In two-player mode, you can squeeze onto the same keyboard if you're close friends, or find opponents on the Internet. Disappointingly, there's no local network option, so you can't use two Macs within your home or office unless they have separate broadband connections. Like all two-player shooters, SketchFighter has had to ponder how ensure the two ships don't stray too far apart to appear within the same screen, and its answer is to hitch them together with a tow cable. You can move independently, just not very far. This works well in cooperative mode, but gets pretty annoying when playing competitively. Although the two-player option extends the life of the game, we didn't find it as compelling as the single-player quest.

Thanks to rest stops that let you recharge your shields and save your game at fairly regular intervals, SketchFighter is a game you can dip in and out of if you don't have time for a heavy session. If you have more time to kill, it comes with an editor that you can use to build your own levels from the same components as the game.

Sketch Fighter is top fun, and excellent value for a tenner. It even has an acoustic chill-out soundtrack to help you de-stress. And if it reawakens your doodling habit, so much the better.