Review: Game About Squares for iPhone and iPad

Game About Squares by Andrey Shevchuk is, sadly, both an exceptionally good puzzle game, and another story of shameless cloning on the App Store. There are actually so many clones that it's almost impossible to find the official version using iTunes, so make sure to use the link above.

Born as a HTML5 app, it was online for some time without gaining much visibility. Interestingly, like 2048 before it, it seems to have become viral after it appeared on Hacker News. Immediately after that, after the week or so needed to pass Apple's review, the App Store was flooded with clones.

And for good reason! This is one of those rare cases of an idea brilliant in its simplicity, but at the same time capable of deep complexity.
Your goal is to bring each square over the dot of the same color. To move the squares, you just tap them, and they move by one step in the direction of the arrow.

Of course the squares aren't always finely aligned like in the above case, so you'll have to nudge them in the right position, by pushing them with other squares.

To add more dynamicity to the movement of the squares, the board can also contain some dark arrows. When a square goes over one of those arrows, its movement direction changes. This is somewhat reminiscent of another great game released this year, Perfect Paths.

And that's all! There are no other mechanics added to the mix.

The game contains 36 puzzles, and be assured that it will keep your interest high until the end. The first few puzzles wonderfully teach the mechanics without need for any tutorial, then the puzzles start to get intriguingly simple and complex at the same time.
This is some of the best level design I've ever seen, and I think it is the final proof that to make a puzzle game varied you don't need to add a lot of different mechanics, but you just need good mechanics that can be pushed to their limits in different ways.

For example I got stuck for a while on this puzzle. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be impossible, until it eventually clicked. Think outside the box.

Inbetween the levels the author has added some jokes which made me smile a few times. Other people hated them.YMMV. Puzzled by the flowery dots in the above screenshot? You'll have to play the game to understand what's going on.

The user interface is minimalist and works perfectly. The only minor issue I had was that the app is simply a wrapper of the HTML5 game done using PhoneGap, so the frame rate is poor on older devices. But this isn't certainly the kind of game that requires 60fps to be enjoyed.

This is without a doubt one of the best puzzle games of 2014, and its author is smart and witty. I hope to see more from him in the near future.

Summary

Nontrivialness	★★★★★
Logical Reasoning	★★★★★
User Interface	★★★★☆
Presentation	★★★★☆
Loading Time	★★★★☆
Saves Partial Progress	✘
Status Bar	✘

©2014 Nicola Salmoria. Unauthorized use and/or duplication without express and written permission is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicola Salmoria and nontrivialgames.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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Review: iON Bond for iPhone and iPad

Apologies for the infrequent updates. I've been tied up by family matters and by contract work on Puzzlium. So many great puzzle games have been released in the past few months! Even if I don't have time to write full reviews, I always talk about the best games on Twitter, so make sure to follow me.
 
It's rare for me to like puzzle games that have a real time element, but iON Bond by Stewart Hogarth caught my interest, probably because the timing is very relaxed and doesn't require deadly accuracy nor lightning fast reflexes.

Those ?????? you can see above intrigued me enough that I made it a point of honor to see what was hiding there before writing this review. I succeeded, which should be good proof that the game is interesting enough, and the difficulty properly balanced.

The premises of the game are pretty simple. There are some particles on the screen, which you can't control directly, but only through bonds that you can form with other particles.

You use your finger to draw bonds. When you connect two particles, they start to interact depending on their sign. Opposite signs attract, equal signs repel. The particles have lots of intertia and they move rather slowly, so you have time to form complex interactions between multiple particles. You can also break the bonds you formed by swiping through them; this is something that you'll need to do often as the game progresses.

When two particles collide, they leave traces reminiscent of the ones we are used to see when reading about particle accelerators. Your primary goal is to make all particles collide. The secondary goal is to collect all the small grey dots (which represent neutrinos).

The particles can have different colors; only particles of the same color will react during a collision, particles of different colors will just stop.

Charged particles are the most common, but there are also neutral particles like the red ones below. They don't interact with other particles, so you need to find other ways to move them.

Normally the walls are friendly: they just stop the particles, but you can draw bonds over them without limitations. Dark walls, however, will destroy particles that hit them, which isn't a good thing, because to complete a level you must destroy the particles only through collisions. Additionally, bonds cannot pass through dark matter, so e.g. in the level below you can't bond the two red particles.

There are many other elements introduced later, like "uncertain" particles, energy fields, unstable particles. This helps keep the game varied through its 60 levels.

The game plays in real time, however it doesn't feel like an action game, because the speed is quite slow. The levels feel more like proper puzzles, because figuring out what to do is harder than timing your actions correctly. Many of the levels have an easy, obvious solution which unfortunately isn't enough to collect the neutrinos. To get those, you often have to go significantly out of your way.

The user interface is improvable. I found it annoying that there isn't a button to immediately restart a level: you need to go through an intermediate menu. I was also put off by the very long fades and unskippable splash screen that happen when you launch the game. It all gives a feeling of a "console" game, instead of a mobile game that one wants to load as quickly as possible.

The game doesn't work well on phones, because everything is very small and difficult to interact with. Additionally, on my 4th gen iPod Touch it ran at a rather low frame rate, making it sluggish and difficult to control. On iPad Mini it works fine.

Curious about what the ?????? button I mentioned at the beginning does? I'm not going to spoil the surprise: you'll need to collect three neutrinos in all levels to see for yourself. However, I think that to make the effort really worthwhile there should be Game Center integration, which sadly is missing.

All in all, this is a nice relaxing game which is worth a try.

Summary

Nontrivialness	★★★☆☆
Logical Reasoning	★★★★☆
User Interface	★★☆☆☆
Presentation	★★★☆☆
Loading Time	★☆☆☆☆
Saves Partial Progress	✘
Status Bar	✘

©2014 Nicola Salmoria. Unauthorized use and/or duplication without express and written permission is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Nicola Salmoria and nontrivialgames.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Read more »