The Most Fun That You Can Have With Your Shoes Off

There are a few things in the category of ‘stuff you were told not to do in a play park, but absolutely did anyway’. I’m sure that a high percentage of us clambered up slides, climbed on top of things that we shouldn’t, and stood up on swings. But the one that Shoe it All! celebrates is loosening your footwear, hopping on swings, and then kicking your shoe (or welly) as far as possible. Extra points if you tried to hit targets or competed with mates to see whose boot got further. 

Amberbite and Bright Gambit know what they’re doing. Lunking your shoes halfway across a park is such a nostalgic and joyous thing to do that a video game makes perfect sense. Of course I want to be smashing windows with shoes from a swing. Why wouldn’t I want to perform headshots with a well-aimed heel?

The Breezy Sensation Of Wind Between Your Toes

Shoe it All! doesn’t mess about. There’s no tutorial or story to get in the way. There’s not even much of a backdrop – just bright white wallpaper. It’s just you, a swing, and a target. Immediately, you know what to do: swing back and forth with the analogue stick, get a decent momentum and lift, then unleash the shoe mid-arc with the A button. Then watch as it curls towards a tree, window, vending machine or pile of avocados, and hope for a glorious reaction. 

And Shoe it All! definitely does glorious reactions. It reminded me a lot of – deep cut incoming – Pain on the PS3. That game had you firing a ragdoll through a cannon, which was funny by itself, as the limbs would flail everywhere. But the world seemed to be made of TNT, and everything exploded, toppled, chain-reacted and generally dominoed in a fantastic fashion. Shoe it All! leans on the same explosive effects, even borrowing the title card as you complete the level, the rock riff, and the checking off of objectives. 

The hittable stuff is pretty innocuous at first. Fire hydrant caps need to be hit to burst forth with water. Sandwich boards need to be toppled over. But Shoe it All! leans into its own absurdity, giving you fewer and fewer realistic situations. Bosses come at you on segways; pipe networks float in the air; Odyssey-style axe-targets need to be flown through. At no point is it unclear what you have to do – Shoe it All! is fantastic at being immediately understandable, even when it says absolutely nothing to you – and there’s a tactile joy of lugging a shoe, just to see what happens.

Getting A Kick Out Of Tossing Shoes

Latter levels even come with their own varieties of shoe. We don’t want to ruin too much, but Shoe it All! loves to borrow weapons from Worms, it seems, and applies them to the shoes for maximum ridiculousness.

Each scene has objectives. Most of the time, these will be based on the number of shoes. Complete a scene with ten shoes and you might get one star. Do it in one, and you will get three. But Shoe it All! tinkers with these rules, and often has fun. Can you finish a level in a set time, or can you uncover a secret? We’ve found golden avocados and others, leading us to secret levels.

With your hard-won stars you can unlock new levels, and they require complete precision and timing. There are challenges, too, which ask you to complete a gauntlet of levels in the quickest time (we’re currently #1 in the world at the Apple levels, so come beat us!) alongside other rulesets. 

It’s almost impossible to feel any animosity towards Shoe it All!. It’s so simple and purely joyful that my kids elbowed me off the controller almost immediately. I’ve managed to recommend the game to two other families already, and I know that there will be more. It’s a game that sells itself, and I suspect that it will build up interest virally through some snowballing influencers. 

We Challenge Anyone To Be Confused About What You Do

Nostalgia plays a big part, as does the pure accessibility: you can just pick up a pad and immediately know what you’re meant to do. The shoe-physics (it feels odd to write it) is spot on, and you can grasp fully when you should be pressing the A button to get maximum lift or distance. When you thunk a shoe into the floor accidentally, it’s entirely your fault. 

But a lot of credit should go to Amberbrite’s execution, too. The world reacts to you in hilarious and over-the-top ways. There’s not a shred of realism here. People ragdoll away for miles, and the slow-motion finishes are so satisfying, as the explosions send matter hurtling through the cosmos. The Rock Band riffs and graffiti-interfaces are just cherries on top. 

Sure, there are grumbles, and they’re probably the ones you expect. It’s entirely superficial: there’s barely any depth to what you’re doing, beyond the subobjectives, the occasional secret level and some extra levels you can buy with cash. What you see in the first level is largely what you get in the last one: the dial just moves up to 11.

A Small-Sized Shoe, But Great To Slip On occasionally

And with the superficiality comes brevity. Again, that’s probably expected, but we completed it front-to-back in a couple of hours. We then immediately went back to play it again, aiming to get three-stars. But that only took us to three hours. Is that enough for you? I can’t possibly tell you that, but it was certainly enough for me. £6.99 isn’t a massive outlay, and I felt like I had got that  – and more – from Shoe it All!. 

There’s a scene in High Fidelity where Jack Black’s character puts on a Beta Band record. Everyone in the record shop listens, goes to the till to ask what it is, and then buys it. Shoe It All! is my video game version of that moment. All you need to get someone to buy it is hand them the controller for five minutes. I hope more people get Shoe it All! In their hands and then insta-buys it, because it’s the most immediately enjoyable game I’ve played this year. And who doesn’t remember kicking shoes off from a swing?