BodySnatcher review

I have a good friend who is a theoretical physicist and an avid juggler, so, naturally, she was the first person I thought of as I was playing with an app that features a juggling Einstein puppet. From the title, you might imagine BodySnatcher to be a much more sinister app than it actually is, but I assure you, it is far goofier than you can imagine.

Forget the movie about creepy alien dopplegangers for a second, because Body Snatchers is entirely kid-friendly fun. With this digital toy, you control a puppet who can sport a head of your choosing. The default available ones include Einstein, the Mona Lisa, and Elvis, but the fun of the app lies in its customization opportunities. You can take a photo of someone, or use a photo from your library, choose a body for it, and make your own puppet from their head. The puppets are very much on the basic side, looking more than a little like Terrance and Phillip from South Park, but they’re definitely worth a giggle or two.

Once your puppet is set up, you can start to have some fun with it. You can animate the puppet in a few different ways, dancing, freefalling, juggling, and what they call “parrot”, which means you can fling the puppet around however you like. The controls are crude at best, so you can forget about putting on complicated puppet shows with your creations; the fine-tuning just isn’t there, but watching them awkwardly dance around is a hoot.

Also, the juggling is especially impressive, since you have an absolutely enormous library of juggling patterns to choose from. It probably wasn’t the developer’s intention, but I imagine that if you were an amateur juggler who just wanted to see a whole bunch of different juggling types, this app would be ideal.

The graphics aren’t great, and the sound, while adequate, definitely starts to get on the repetitive side. Unless you’ve got young kids, this will really only keep your attention for a few minutes, but it’ll be a few minutes of good clean fun. You can’t use two puppets at once, which was a little disappointing, but you can email pictures of your creations to all of your friends if you desire.

I liked BodySnatcher for what it was, but it didn’t really make full use of its vast potential. I would love to see a cheap premium version with more than just the basic jeans and t-shirt bodies and more dynamic backgrounds, but with this free version you’re definitely getting more than your money’s worth.

AppSafari Rating: 3.5/5

AppSafari review of BodySnatcher was written by Tracy Yonemoto on April 14th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Free, Fun, Games. Page viewed 6421 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.