Game Review: Ice Cream Roll (Mobile – Free to Play)

This is what passes for a game these days on the free to play mobile market. A ‘game’ where all you do is move your finger up the screen and then add a few toppings to create an ice-cream.

Rinse, watch ad, repeat, watch ad.

Lucky Kat Studios love a piss-poor free to play offering and Ice Cream Roll can proudly call itself a piss-poor offering.

Doing the bare minimum to be called a game, whatever claims it makes to be a relaxing experience is lost within its pure tediousness. You can’t help but wonder why they’d even bother when the majority of people probably just delete it after just a couple of minutes.

However, the answer is simple. Ad revenue. Within 5 minutes you’ll have been subjected to a plethora of ads. If you average each ice cream creation at 30 seconds long with an ad after every go, that’s 10 ads. Excessive is the understatement.

However, that is not all as the game also rewards you with new toppings or coin boosts, but you’ll have to watch an un-skippable ad to get them. Ads. Ads absolutely everywhere.

It’s such a mind-numbing and tedious experience, it’s not worth putting up with them. Its attempts at creating longevity laughable although it can be at least praised for even bothering.

Such is the state of the free to play market. That we now feel the need to praise a game for adding reasons to play it. Simply staggering.

Earn coins by completing ice-creams and they can be spent on upgrading your shop. Note – there are no actual upgrades to your shop. Instead you’ll spend an ever-increasing amount of coins to change its visual aesthetic.

You can also spend your coins on unlocking a random new scrapper, worth doing just so you can unlock one with a bigger blade. Thus getting more ice cream up and ending the level quicker. That’s as good as it gets.

There are no variations on gameplay and no increase in difficulty. Scrap the ice-cream into a bowl, add the right toppings to score 3 stars and earn some coins.

Rinse, watch ad, repeat, watch ad.