Jungle Twister Puzzle Expedition review

Andrew Williams

We review Jungle Twister Puzzle Expedition,a game where you play as a plant with a difference

Published on Sep 3, 2009

We may romanticise the rainforest as an unfettered playground for mother earth, but you know that as soon as you got there, you’d be sweating through your clothes and twitching at every move in the undergrowth, assuming some deadly snake or spider was about to clamp its jaws around your ankle.

In Jungle Twister, even the plants can outrun a jungle tourist. You play as a vine, trying desperately to grow up to the next level of the canopy. It’s a true one-button game, where a press changes the direction of the vine’s growth.

The vine doesn’t continue growing unless you press the button, with each press essentially sparking-off the growth of another vine section. Along this section, flowers bloom at specific points. They collect ‘good bugs’ that litter each level and act as the game’s currency. With them, you can buy new and more powerful flowers to stick on your vine as you progress.

Each level is also packed with nasties too though. You need to time your button presses carefully to avoid them, as you can’t take that many hits before you have to restart the level. For the most part, Jungle Twister isn’t hugely challenging in terms of just getting to the end of each level, but the will to try and get as many bugs as you can is strong.

Jungle Twister has a real sense of zen too, as you build up a curious rhythm to your button presses. This doesn’t stay the same throughout the game though as the behaviour of your vine changes in each of the seven worlds. There are between five and seven levels per world too, offering a fair amount of horticultural bang for your buck.

In spite of its oddly organic feel, the most compelling aspect is still that megalomaniac urge to make your vine all-powerful as you get access to more powerful flowers, eventually including those that can blast enemy bugs.

In spite of the late-emerging action elements, Jungle Twister is still a highly original one-off, a relaxing and mesmerising casual trip into a beautifully stylised, compelling world… of vines.