Raining Coins Review

Raining Coins is a game that contains large similarities with popular mobile games and aims to broaden the premise with some sharp new ideas and a more original and challenging set of methods to satisfy players. The game is based on a sad, small girl who wants to purchase a toy from a local shop. However, she has no money with which to buy these items. Her hopes rise however as the clouds begin to rain coins, and from there, the game begins.

The central gameplay revolves around catching falling coins from clouds and mechanisms from the sky. Players must move the girl left and right and must place her in the right position for the coins to fall into her piggy bank. As coins are collected, a meter in the bottom-left side of the screen increases, with a number representing the number of coins collected. If The amount of collect coins contributes to the overall rating of each level, which monitors the progress of the player. If all coins are collected, the player will earn 100% approval and will be awarded three stars. Just above 50% will award them with one star, while about 75% will award them with two stars. Each level, however, delivers a different amount of coins for the player to catch. In some levels, players may be required to collect up to 50 coins, while others would require less or even more. Because of this, players are always tasked with keeping track of how many coins they will need to collect if they fail to get three stars.

To Increase the difficulty of each level, the game uses a variety of mechanics to further challenge the player. The first levels, after the tutorial, would use wind to blow clouds back and forth so that players underneath them would need to try to stay directly underneath the cloud in order to catch the coins falling from it. Much later on, new mechanisms, like ramps carried by birds, could be placed underneath the cloud to swerve coins in separate directions. These different mechanics provide a great amount of variety to each level and they do their job well in increasing the game’s difficulty to a significant level, especially near the end of the game.

While the amount of mechanics used is commendable, the structure of the game and the way in which it stages the introduction of new mechanics can be inconsistent. In one level, players could be tasked with catching coins from a challenging new ramp, but the next level could be much more straightforward and only consist of catching coins from a moving cloud. This structure overall slightly hurts the difficulty of the game and the flow of which the game presents the gameplay.

Players aren’t always left alone to deal with the overwhelming difficulty of the levels, however. In several levels, an owl will drop a special coin used to aid players in catching the coins. One of these abilities is to display a sequence of dots from each cloud, which will show the direction in which coins will bounce and eventually fall. While the speed of the situation makes the levels remain challenging, this ability helps greatly with helping players learn the place of where they must be in order to catch the coins.

The game is split into 5 different shops (puzzlingly called worlds in the game) which each contain an object the girl wants to buy. Each world/shop contains 20 levels, where the quality of the player is measured by three stars. After each level is completed the player will be awarded up to three stars, depending on how many coins they have collected. To pass each shop, players must be awarded a significant amount of stars, which could be obtained either by partially succeeding in each level or winning all three stars for each level.

The game has a cutesy and light-hearted visual style, which is dedicated to much younger players. The game presents an appealing amount of charm through its style and the soft soundtrack fits well into each of the situations of the game, ranging from the menu screen – to the most intense levels in the game. Unfortunately, the animation quality of the game takes a dip and it can take players out of the moment. The girl’s movement is portrayed by some poor animations that make her seem entirely like a puppet on strings, but not in a good way. This is a kids game after all but the extremely cheap movements of the girl can become distracting quickly and could take some of the enjoyment of the game’s presentation.

Raining coins is a joyous game, that provides enough challenge and originality to make it stand out. The premise, gameplay and overall tone may not appeal to older audiences and the levels. Many of the animations are wooden and the structure could be inconsistent, but the game is a fitting addition to its genres.

REVIEW CODE: A PS4 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.