The Rumble Pack

Freakyforms: Your Creations Alive has very modest ambitions. While most games with creation tools hope that you’ll use said tools to serve the play, with Freakforms, there’s very little play to be found at all. Instead, the game is entirely focused on giving life to any creature, inanimate object or idea you can imagine, often in the crudest and goofiest way possible. It doesn’t matter if you create an ordinary, normally-proportioned dog; the moment your “formee” is in motion, he’ll be stumbling and bumbling as if he wet noodles for legs. This is the video game equivalent of Dumpy the Pumpkin or that awful sputtering ketchup bot or any of the other inane-yet-lovable things we frequently bring up on our podcast each week. Freakforms aims to please so much that you can’t help but forgive so many of its failings.

To be fair, the actual creation mode, in which you’ll spend a good deal of time, is incredibly versatile. As you play through the adventure, you’re offered dozens of parts, all of which can be stretched, shrunken, rotated and thickened to suit your needs. As long as your formee has a mouth and a body, the game will find a way to put it into motion, and there isn’t an advanced physics model or anything like that to get in the way. I love LittleBigPlanet as much as anyone, but sometimes I just want to slap some wheels on a brick and call it a car. Freakyforms lets you make things as rudimentary or as complex as you’d like, but you’ll never be punished for ever making something “incorrectly.”

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