yycApps - iPhone apps From Calgary Developers.

Since the dawn of civilization humans have strived to procreate with the strongest and healthiest of their peers. Also since the dawn of civilization, the weakened masses have tried to kill the vibe and keep sexy people like you and I from gettin’ down. It’s time to take the power back, and BigStack Studios’ latest offering aims to do just that.

Hottie Hookups is a strategy game involving task management that works in a similar way to the developers previous hit games Sally’s Salon and Sally’s Spa. You are tasked with giving the powers of natural selection a helping hand by getting the sexy members of society together whilst keeping the vibe-killing nerds from wrecking the action.

The game takes place on the various dance-floors of clubs all over the world. As the hotties enter the fray it’s your duty to match them up with their ideal partner (somebody equally as sexy and preferably with the same colour of shirt). Each type of pairing has a different time needed to dance together before they must give-in to carnal desires. Once they are ready, it’s your job to get them into a taxi (preferably one that matches the shirt colour) so that they can fulfill their end of the bargain and make the world a prettier place.

It sounds easy, and it would be if not for the nerds. Not content on being sexless and solitary themselves, the nerds feel it their responsibility to make sure that if they can’t join in the coital fun then nobody can. They infest the dance-floor like plague rats, spreading the buzz-kill through epileptic inspired dance moves and an intolerable lack of personal grooming. Each hottie pair also has a nerd tolerance. If the nerds aren’t dealt with, your hotties will break up go home frustrated.

What makes Hottie Hookups redeeming is how you must handle the nerds. There are 8 classifications of nerds that range from your standard run-of-the-mill geek all the way up to furries. That’s right … this game has furries. People that want to dress up like animals for sexual pleasure. You’re forgiven if you stop reading right now to go buy the app.

Each nerd must be handled in a different way. Some need to be tilt-rolled off the screen, while others need to be flicked, poked or shook. This manages to keep the action rolling and your head spinning with what action to perform. You don’t know what hectic is until you’ve tried to roll a portly nerd off the dance floor while simultaneously trying to destroy the mech-armour of a giga-nerd and shaking a cougar off one of your finer looking male patrons.

The curve of difficulty is very well implemented, with levels ramping up the needed skill just slightly enough that you are always challenged while never being overly frustrated. I suppose my wife did almost throw her iPod Touch through the window when her battery died as her last hottie couple was to enter their cab on the last level of the game, but that’s hardly the fault of the game.

Hottie Hookups also integrates with the OpenFeint system, giving you access to a social gaming network where you can view leaderboards, attain trophies and chat with your friends. Expect features like this to dwindle once Apple releases it’s own social gaming platform later this year, but this will do wonderfully until that arrives.

For a $0.99 game this app drips with smooth animations and extremely solid control. Once in the later stages you’ll be amazed at just how precise you can be when handling multiple people in a few frantic swipes. Rarely did I perform an action that was unintended, and with the amount happening on-screen that is quite the claim. The music is fun to listen to, and if you don’t like it you can substitute your own.

Overall this game goes above and beyond what you’d expect from a $0.99 game. It isn’t the longest experience you can find in the app store, but any shorter and it wouldn’t feel like enough while any longer and it might begin to feel overdone.