Ever tried a candy called ‘Sour Patch Kids?’ I haven’t, but believe it or not, I really don’t like candy that much. Never have, even when I was a kid. That’s just one weird fact you now know about boring ol’ me. ANYWAY, even though I’m not familiar with the candy, I have seen the “Sour Patch Kids” commercials that advertise the confections being both sour and sweet by having the candy character play a mean trick (sour), and then being nice (sweet). Now you can play as one of the sweet candy characters as you explore a “World Gone Sour,” a downloadable game for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC (360 version reviewed here).

In World Gone Sour, you play as a piece of the Sour Patch Kids candy. You get spilled out of your packet, and now you must make your way through sticky movie theater floors, trash cans, refrigerators, and fast food stands to reach your ultimate goal: the human stomach! The game is a 2-D platform jumping adventure. Your sugary sweet little dude can jump, double jump, and stomp on enemies like a typical video game hero. Collect gumdrops for extra lives and stars for bonus points.

As you play, you’ll collect smaller Sour Patch Kids who will follow you. You can do various things with your little minions. You can aim and throw them at switches and enemies, but be careful because you might lose them if you throw them at something dangerous. You can also hold a button to make the smaller candies merge into you to make yourself bigger. When you are big, you can jump higher, ground pound, and take extra hits from baddies. Break apart to become smaller again when you need to fit into small spaces.

The imaginative graphics do a good job of depicting a giant world full of candy boxes, snack bags, plastic cups, bits of trash, and more. Avoid or stomp enemies and sour candies, but you get bonus points depending on how you and your sweet army meets their demise! You can also play co-op with a second player, but it’s hard to see one another when you have an army of little candies following both players. Maybe a marker above the players’ heads would’ve solved that problem. It’s always a good idea to have enough followers to make your main character grow so you can take hits, because when you are the smallest, it’s one hit and you die. Luckily you get a good amount of lives and there are plenty of checkpoints. Aside from some slightly wonky hit detection issues, it’s a fairly decent (albeit weird) game if you like 2-D platformers about crazy candy.

Kid Factor:

World Gone Sour is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Cartoon Violence, Language, and Suggestive Themes. While the candy characters skewer, torch, melt, and squash each other, the violence is no worse than something like say, Mr. Bill (am I aging myself there?). The language mostly comes from the game’s narrator, whose cursing mostly comes off as being unnecessary rather than funny. But then, the humor in the game, as well as the candy itself, seems to cater toward the young teen crowd, who would eat this stuff up (literally and figuratively). Lower the TV volume and I’d be OK with nearly any kid playing this.

Tags: Game Reviews