However, it’s a significantly expanded experience, offering more of everything – just like a main course should, really. Tasty Planet: Back for Seconds uses many of the same ingredients as the first game and tastes similar as a result. While the graphics don’t appear to have made the most of the series’s four year hiatus, they are a definite improvement, with greater detail and some pleasing real-time scaling effects. The occasional between-level comic strips return from the first game, and there’s the same joyfully silly tone to it all as our blob unwittingly plays havoc with history. After you’ve cleared the first world, you might only be able to face up to the game in short bursts, as the pace is relentlessly and surprisingly intense. Still, the action remains pretty constant throughout. There are also maze-like levels, where your aimless wandering is replaced by a need to grow in order to escape the confines of your makeshift prison. These can take the form of collection quests, where you must seek out a set number of a specific object. This eat-to-grow gameplay can become a little stale, but Dingo Games does pretty well at keeping you on your toes with special levels. Soon, though, you can turn the tables, and there’s nothing more satisfying than gobbling up the very creature that just chased you the length of the level. Some creatures will actively hunt you down, requiring all your dexterity (you can steer with either the mouse or arrow keys this time) to avoid them.

While you can feast on anything smaller than you, there are many more things bigger than and hostile towards you. The view zooms back to reflect your new status and perspective, and your role switches from being a big fish in a small pond in an instant.ĭingo plays on this reversal of fortunes nicely with the enemy AI. You might be growing steadily on a diet of grubs and bugs, only to suddenly take an evolutionary leap to a point where you’re eating dinosaurs and rocks. Unlike the first game’s rather linear growth curve, which saw your blob growing within the confines of its immediate environment, Back for Seconds frequently sees you expanding seamlessly into a whole new world.

Indeed, this reflects the sequel’s upping of the ante over the first game, and the assured way developer Dingo Games handles the rapid escalation of scale. This sparks a time-spanning adventure taking in dinosaurs, Egyptians, Romans and more. From there it’s onwards and upwards, as you feast on microscopes, lab rats and – ultimately – a time machine left sat in the corner. You start off the size of a small coin, gobbling up the bits of candy left carelessly on a lab table by your creator’s gormless assistant. While the first game started you off at a microscopic level, Back for Seconds ups the scale from the off. Like Namco Bandai’s crazy ball-rolling game, the idea was to guide your googly-eyed blob around its environment and oversee its growth through eating everything in sight. Tasty Planet was, for all intents and purposes, a 2D Katamari Damacy. Given the sizeable gap between courses, perhaps an appetizer is in order. Sure enough, the sentient grey blob is back and hungrier than ever. After all, the first course of 2D eat ’em up action was served up almost four years ago. If Tasty Planet really is “back for seconds” it must be starving. After a four year wait, Tasty Planet returns for more planet-gobbling action

Tasty planet back for seconds levels