Thank You TreeFall Studios for providing us with a review code!

I previously tried out one of TreeFall Studio’s earlier games, Tilting Tiles. A simple game on its surface with a surprising amount of depth as you play the later levels. Keeping up the trend of inexpensive titles that are very easy to pick up is their latest title: Mighty Math.

The goal is to survive as long as you can, collecting and dodging the numbers that appear on the screen. You play as a 3x3 grid and each number that appears on the screen can range from +1 to +9, or -1 or -9. For each round, you must collect a specific amount of numbers indicated at the top left of the screen by check marks. What your grid character represents is that any number collected adds or subtracts to your total, and you must keep your balance between 0 and 9. If you go below 0 or 9 at any point, you get a game over. You also get a game over if you fail to collect the allocated amount of numbers before the round ends.

Every run starts with only a few numbers for the beginning rounds moving very slowly. The only way you’d lose any of the earlier rounds is if you’re not paying attention. There’s also a fast-forward function to speed up the process so that the earlier rounds aren’t too much of a bore. Even so, I still find the early levels to be pretty slow so repeating them often can get slightly annoying. While the premise is incredibly simplistic, later rounds quickly ramp up in intensity. Numbers start varying in speed. Some numbers may spin around to trick your eyes so a “-6” might end up being a “-9”. Numbers may even start to overlap with each other. With the sheer amount of numbers flooding the screen and all the dodging you have to do, it started to feel like one of them danmaku (bullet curtain) games. You could almost call Mighty Math... a “dan’math’ku”. (I'm sorry shoot 'em up fans, that was bad, even for me.) To help out during intense moments, you have a bomb of sorts to clear the screen, but be careful, if you do this and you haven’t collected enough numbers, you’ll cause yourself a game over—which I found out the hard way.

Mighty Math keeps the visuals straightforward. All you have are black number graphics and a white background. While the graphics aren’t going to win any awards, the plain visuals work for what the game is. In a game as fast-paced as this, visual clarity is very important. Sometimes developers can get lost in the graphical flair and add a bunch of visuals that not only tank the performance, but obscure important things to dodge or collect, leading to "unfair losses", in which this particular developer avoids. Because of this, the stability is excellent and I haven’t witnessed a crash yet. Every game over was a fault of my own. The music consists of one jingle while playing through the game. It manages to be pretty catchy alongside the snappy sound design.


I’m not sure how TreeFall did it, but Mighty Math managed to be more intense for me than many combat-based action games. I never was a math-inclined person growing up and still aren’t, but I found Mighty Math to be a lot of fun. One strange thing is that while the Mighty Math format complements the Switch almost perfectly, it’s exclusive to the PS4. You can achieve a similar experience with PlayStation’s Remote Play function/app, but that requires a lot of outside factors working well such as a stable internet connection and/or mobile data. Anyone from young to old can find enjoyment in this. I can even see this as a good educational tool for someone learning addition and subtraction, or someone who wants to train their brain. Maybe if I had this while growing up, I would have enjoyed math way more.