The Seventh One-Button Collection is a Little Less Than Heavenly
Game studios shut down, franchises fail, but a constant is a One Button Games 5-in-1 game every three months. No matter what happens in the world, there will always be a bundle of five games, some fun and some diabolical, to stick a mark out of 5 against.
A golden rule of the One Button Games compendiums is that the best games come first on the menu. It makes sense: a player is going to start at the top of the main menu and work down, so it’s best to make a good first impression.
Well, psych! Because One Button Games 5-in-1 vol. 7 is absolutely all over the place. The quality order is roughly 5, 2, 1, 4, 3. It’s just not playing by the rules.
Number Line – 3/5
Are you a mathematical beautiful mind? Well, Number Line might be for you.
Across the top and bottom of the screen runs a ticker of numbers. There’s loads of them, all from 1-10, and they jostle about in an attempt to make it difficult to parse them all. If you’re observant, you will also notice that the two tickers are moving closer together over time. If you don’t press any button, they will eventually collide and it’s game over.
Your task is to stop that happening. And you stop that happening by pressing the A button and comparing the sum of all the numbers on the top and bottom. If the top is greater than the bottom then bravo, you have moved the two tickers apart proportional to the distance between the two sums. There’s not much better than outscoring the bottom ticker by 20+ and watching the two jump apart.
It is, oddly, brainless. It’s impossible to count up the top and bottom in time (although I’m sure there are some prodigies who would disagree), and the colour coding is arbitrary, so you can’t wait until one hue is dominant. So, you’re mostly just pressing A when enough 7-9s turn up before crossing your fingers. It’s a little shallow, and not helped by colouring the numbers arbitrarily. But it’s a diverting few minutes as you hoover up achievements.
Pin Climb – 3/5
Channeling the spirit of Peak is Pin Climb. Your task is to climb up a sequence of pins, as the screen slowly crawls downwards. You need to keep moving unless you want to succumb to a Game Over.
You are constantly spinning a rope around the pin in a circle. Hold A and that rope grows while still spinning. If you hit a pin with that rope, then you automatically haul yourself up to it, where the whole revolving rope thing continues.
It’s extraordinarily clever and immediate. I found myself gravitating to the left-hand side of the screen (the rope moves clockwise) so that I could get into a rhythm of extending the rope once it was past the other pins. If I didn’t, I would hook to a pin lower down and inevitably die.
It’s very good until it isn’t. I’m not a fan of how the default length of the rope is longer than the distance between some pins. So you can’t stop for a moment, and you can very easily get stuck in an eternal swapping match between two close pins. If you accidentally hook onto a cluster of close pins, you are effectively dead. Which is a bit duff.
Smily Angry – 2/5
Smily Angry fits into the category of ‘great on paper, a bit of a nightmare to play’. There’s one of them in every One-Button collection.
It’s basically a collectathon, but with ‘Simon Says’ rules. There are two faces floating above you, and those faces pump out collectibles. But you are only allowed to grab those collectibles if the face is smiling. If the face is angry, then you’re going to die if you touch them. The faces alternate between smiling and angry randomly, so you have to be reactive.
See? Sounds fine. But too much is against you. The faces change suddenly, and you can be halfway through collecting something when they pivot. There’s too much going on, making the game hard to read. The shapes and colours of the faces/collectibles are deliberately confusing, so you can’t rely on any patterns. And that’s particularly awful when both an angry and smily face are pumping out the same symbol in the same colour.
Up Shot – 2.5/5
Up Shot feels like the natural conclusion to a lot of the ‘A to stop’ endless runners that have been accumulating in these collections.
You’re a little dude who runs from left-to-right, and can press (or hold) A to stop. While stopped, you fire bullets directly upwards. That’s helpful when blocks fall like the drops from a tap. You need to find a gap in those dropping rocks to either run through or heroically stand in the middle of the rocks and destroy them all. You just need to be mindful of the screen catching up while you’re rooted to the spot.
It’s a good concept, but I’m not sold on the enemies being avalanches of blocks, all in a vertical line. There’s less call for strategy or reactions if your enemies are this orderly. And you’re overly punished for staying to fight: bigger blocks can break up into smaller blocks, so you can perfectly time your sidestep into the rockfall and still die. There’s too much of a push to just dodge rather than fire.
V Bomb – 4/5
Last of all is V Bomb, sitting in the ‘save the worst till last’ slot. But hello! – it’s the best one here.
You’re a spaceship, bouncing around on the top of the screen. You can press A to reverse direction. On the bottom of the screen are enemy spaceships, and they drop bombs if you’re parallel with them. Those bombs tick down on a timer and will explode, wiping out anything that’s vertically aligned with them: your ship, enemy ships, or even bombs, creating a chain reaction.
You can’t shoot these bombs. All you can do is dodge them. BUT you also kite the enemy spaceships with your movement. So, you can hover near the bombs, bringing the enemy ships with you, then leg it. By tempting fate, you can wipe the screen of any enemies, making things easier for yourself.
It’s really quite clever. To be the best at V Bomb, you need to expose yourself to danger. Dodging death gets the adrenaline going, making V Bomb the clear winner of One Button Games 5-in-1 vol. 7.
A Slight Dip in Quality for the One Button Games 5-in-1 Series
In summary, One Button Games 5-in-1 vol. 7 is not one of ABA Games and m1s3ry’s finest. I’d love to say that V Bomb saves it – a clutch win from the fifth game in the list – but it’s too little, too late.
The first four games all have a strong concept, but they’re prone to a single design decision that makes them unforgiving or lacking in flow. It wouldn’t have taken much to file these infuriating off, or to introduce them in later levels. It makes us wonder if a little more care and a slower release frequency would do the One Button Games 5-in-1 series wonders.
Important Links
One Button Games 5-in-1 Vol. 7 Keeps The Series Rolling – https://www.thexboxhub.com/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-7-keeps-the-series-rolling/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-7/9P5LT76B9GCJ/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-7-xbox-one/9PMQPLST60R4/0010
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/one-button-games-5-in-1-vol-7-windows/9NJQ4V4053G1/0010
