The animation is sublime, and each level is packed full of tiny little incidental details that help you form an attachment to our protagonist and his pet.
Tiny Thief, like Icebreaker before it, is beautiful and distinctive to look at. If we could name two defining aspects of a Rovio Stars game this early on, it would have to be polish and character. Still, the sheer inventiveness of the scenarios and the gentle humour woven through each of Tiny Thief's levels keeps you progressing and, yes, enjoying yourself - even when the gameplay is occasionally only a notch or two above those interactive kiddy books that are in abundance on the App Store. There are additional incentives in the form of optional extras you can collect - as well as an ongoing Where's Wally?-type game with your little pet - but, again, the solutions to these vary between the obvious and the downright obtuse. We didn't find ourselves inclined to use it until the end of the third world, but it still seems like a pretty obvious shortcoming. This isn't helped by a hint system that can only be activated every four hours. The worst make little sense, and rely on trial-and-error and aimless wandering and tapping to see where our hero can affect the world. The best levels are imaginative yet logical. Stray near an object that can be used or picked up and a tappable command prompt will pop up. Puzzles are solved in a linear fashion by collecting, using, and interacting with objects in a set order. The idea is to guide a light-fingered youth around a series of simple medieval environments, pinching from mean-spirited authority figures and helping out the disadvantaged like some pint-sized Robin Hood. Tiny Thief plays like a point-and-click adventure game shrunk down and separated into standalone bite-sized challenges. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tiny Thief doesn't manage to scale those same heights - but it's also sufficiently fresh to warrant a closer look.
We recently saw the very first Rovio Stars offering, Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage, which wowed us all with its supremely well-balanced brand of physics-based puzzling. The Rovio Stars publishing initiative is only one game old as Tiny Thief comes to market, but 5 Ants's game already has a formidable challenge living up to the label's high standards.
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