A Micro Review™SHOVELWARE. It's a term that gets bandied around a lot in the gaming scene. Usually it's a derogatory term for a game that's created and thrown out of the door as quickly and cheaply as possible in order to generate a small profit in a short space of time. These games tend to be clones, or asset flips, or low effort, so they can be "shoveled" out to market one after the other, creating a huge pile of, essentially, crap. Since the advent of achievements and persistent gamer profiles, Xbox shovelware tends to focus on easy achievements with lots of gamerscore that can be obtained in minutes.
Alpacapaca Dash isn't shovelware.
It's something worse.
The "game" sees you pressing a button to make an Alpaca jump over gaps as it runs automatically from left to right across what appears to be a canyon. You can also press a secondary button to make a giant laser erupt from it's head and kill enemies that occupy those platforms, or enemies that fly about a bit. On the way, you'll collect coins used to pallet swap your alpaca, or purchase upgrades that simply increase the value of the coins.
After about four minutes of playing, a fairy appears in the sky and you unlock an achievement saying you've won.
The end.
Alpacapaca Dash features about five different patterns of platforms which are easily memorised. It also gets faster as you play, but it's not the running speed of the alpaca which increases: It's the actual game speed itself. Everything becomes faster - jumping, enemies, the whole thing. The game simply speeds up the rate at which it runs, with everything being tied to the same variable.
As you go, you can collect upgrades and downgrades which do things like increase the amount of time you can have your laser active or, or rescue you if you fall into a pit. Downgrades do the opposite, robbing you of a rescue or lowering your laser time. These are collected through sheer luck, though, as they float up and down in the environment and you can't control the speed of the alpaca, so you have to hope you run through them when they're above ground level. Likewise, the downgrades often can't be avoided.
The sprites are awful - seemingly drawn in MS Paint and cut out onto a sprite sheet with low detail and terrible animation. The resolution of the background is about on par with Teletext, with seemingly random objects like lollipops and slices of cake floating through it. Even the collectible coins look like round, golden discs of antijoy.
AchievementsTitle updates abound on this one, but most of them revolve around collecting coins and dying. Easily completed in less than half an hour, including updates. One of the achievements asks you to die thirty times - something Bill Murray managed to make look fun, but here it's simply a tedious objective to unlock an achievement.
OverallThe whole "game" is the lowest effort title I've ever seen on any console, ever. That includes those dodgy 30-in-1 Gameboy cartridges you used to be able to buy. An abomination by anyone's standards.
This isn't shovelware. This is scraping-the-barrel-ware.
.5