Mamma mia! All the pies in Papa Louie’s pizzaria have turned into interdimensional portals and pizza-monsters!!!

We’re not sure what the guys at Flipline Studios have been smoking lately, but this trippy little platformer game even gave ME the munchies.

As with most games from Flipline Studios, the art is fantastic, giving a lot of variety in the levels, and a bunch of interesting characters ranging from stylized people, to killer onions and hamburgers.

The sound and music is as good as we’ve come to expect as well. The sound effects are all fitting and high quality, and the music doesn’t get old even after playing for an hour. The stage select music is even a bit of a throwback to ‘Super Mario World’ on the SNES.

Playing the game is easy… perhaps too easy. It’s typical run and jump, but you also get a pizza paddle you can use to bash baddies (and swat cheese loogies at the pizza monsters), throw pepper bombs (which are bottles of crushed peppers), and use your chef’s hat to like a parachute to glide through the air.

The goal in the game is to turn all the pizza monsters in each level back into pizza pies, so that you can carry them and become heavy enough to lift a pully-based cage that is holding valuable customers within.

Like I mentioned, it’s a pretty easy game, unless you go out of your way to collect every coin and kill every enemy. The only thing that makes it challenging is the unusual control scheme. Having Z and X as action buttons, with SPACE as the jump key takes a bit of getting used to for people more comfortable with using keys in the same row. Of course if you have JoyToKey (which lets you emulate keyboard input with a gamepad), it’s not an issue at all.

The fact that it’s so easy is great for casual gamers, especially when you combine the fact it saves your game progress for you. If you just want to play something that’s not a puzzle game or a gadget game fro a few minutes on a break, or whatever, this is a good game to roll with.

Hardcore players, however, might want to pass on this one.

All-in-all, I thought it was fun, and it had an interesting look and concept (even if it didn’t make any sense).

Of course, I’m sure they said the same thing about Mario back in the day too.

[ Play Papa Louie ]