Review: Transmission: Connect to communicate for iPhone and iPad

Transmission: Connect to Communicate by Loju technically is a promotional app for the Science Museum, so it might even be confused for an "educational" app. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In reality, it is one of the best puzzle games relased this year.

Launched last week as part of the campaign for the opening of the new Information Age gallery, it received many praises from my Twitter followers, and for good reason.

From the first moment, Transmission is captivating thanks to its gorgeous visuals and audio. The people involved are really talented: from the Loju founders, Jon Mallison and Luke Holland (check their portfolios!) to David Kanaga, author of the music.

The mechanics initially look like something already seen many times: your goal is to connect the nodes on the screen, passing the small cubes from one to the next. The circular nodes are transceivers: you can go to them and them move on to another node. The square nodes are receivers: they always terminate the path.
The number of cubes inside each node indicate how many signals you must send to them.

The interaction is wonderfully presented, with connections that lively animate as you drag from one node to another, accompanied by telecommunication sounds like phones ringing, modems, and so on.

The connections you make can cross, but cannot go through another node. For example in the level below, the node in the top left cannot directly connect to the one in the bottom right.

While playing was fun, during the first few levels it didn't look like things could get really interesting: yes, I was getting more signals to deliver, but it was only a matter of laying down the path. There didn't seem to be anything else to it.

At that point, the game surprised me, introducing an unexpected new concept: loops!

See, in the above level you only have one signal; all the nodes need to receive two signals, so at first glance it might seem impossible. But if you make a loop, that single signal will continue travelling along the connections you had already placed, eventually filling all the nodes.

This is a sensational mechanic, which took me a while to fully understand. The key observation is that a signal can only move to a node if the node has an empty cube, otherwise it stops. You therefore need to set up the loops in ways that allow the signals to travel as long as possible.

After the core mechanic is introduced, the game can also add multiple objectives. One of them is to finish the level with a signal orbiting the node marked with a star. Needless to say, the star is rarely on the node where the most intuitive solution would lead. Other kinds of objectives including solving the level without crossing connection, or using only a limited number of connections.

The levels become even more interesting as new forms of communication are introduced. For example broadcast antennas send the signals they receive to all the nodes around them.

And there's many more; I'm not going to list them all.

Rarely have I felt so challenged by a puzzle game, in such a stimulating way. The puzzles are not difficult because they are hard, but because you really need to stop and understand how things work. The mechanics are both accessible and impenetrable at the same time. This is really an achievement on the designer's part.

Judging by the Game Center leaderboards, the number of people playing this game is nowhere near what it deserves. That's an injustice which needs to be rectified. Download it, now.

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: Pokergreen Puzzles for iPhone and iPad

Pokergreens is not quite "the next Sudoku", as its author Ronald Stewart calls it, but it successfully manages to mix the mechanics of classic pen-and-paper puzzles with the rules of poker.

This is the kind of puzzle game that was common in the early days of the App Store: a simple, lackluster user interface, but very clever mechanics. It reminded me of games like CounterbalancE and Combination, which I reviewed when I started this blog.

Here is how it works: you are given a few cards laid out over a 5x5 grid, and for every row and column you are told what kind of poker hand it should contain. At the bottom of the screen you have the cards to use . The solution is always unique.

The great thing about this concept is that the each type of poker hand provides different information, so you need to come up with all kinds of logic deductions to make use of it. This is quite different from Sudoku, where the rule is always the same.

For example in the puzzle above, the second row needs to contain two pairs. There are no 5s available, so the pairs must be two 7 and two Jacks. The last column must be a flush, so all cards must be hearts, so the 7 of spades cannot go there; similarly, you can't put there the Jack of clubs. The only possible combination is therefore this one:

Applying only rigorous logical deductions like this one, you always arrive at the unique solution.

The game also has a tutorial to introduce you to the rules, though I found it a bit confusing and lacking focus. It starts like this:

So I diligently followed the advice, placing cards on the grid, not noticing that after a single move the message at the bottom had already changed:

The information about the poker hands is actually well done, and interactive: you can try bringing any of the three cards over the question mark, and it will tell you what kind of hand you created.

This concept is not new, though I haven't found any other app on the App Store implementing it. I found a couple Windows apps, called (no prizes for originality) Poker Sudoku, and Sudoku Poker. They appear to be very similar, though from the screenshots it looks like a high card hand is simply called "High", without specifying which card is the highest. In Pokergreen, you are told whether the high card is an Ace, or a King, etc. Many logic deductions can be based on that additional information.

The oldest mention I could find of this concept is in the 1999 World Puzzle Championships, as reported on janko.at. Note that in that case you are also told the hand in the two major diagonals, while you are not told which cards to add to the grid (you have a 28-card set and need to leave out 3 cards). Again, I prefer the Pokergreen version, because not relying on the diagonals is more elegant, and knowing which cards to use is more intuitive and allows for more deductions.

I found another interesting one on a New York Times blog, which also has a detailed step-by-step solution by Nick Baxter. The interesting thing about that one is that some clues only show the suit of the card, others only its value. That's a nice twist that I don't think Pokergreens implements, even in the later puzzles.

The user interface of the app works well, though it could use some improvements. I think the most obvious shortcoming is the lack of a proper reward for solving a puzzle. You just get a standard iOS alert, which looks more like an error message than a reward. Some celebratory animation would be in order here.

The solved alert says the time it took you to solve the puzzle and, oddly, gives no way to move to the next puzzle. You have to go back to the main menu and pick a new one. The puzzle selection is odd too, using a horizontally scrolling list.

The time taken also doesn't seem to be paused when you send the app to the background, so in a few cases I was told it took me hours to solve the puzzles, which certainly wasn't true.

Another thing I disliked about the user interface is the behavior of the Sort button. It cycles among many different ways to sort the cards, when sorting by value first, suit second, or suit first, value second would have been more than enough.

The game contains 13 free puzzles, which are not many but should be enough for at least an hour of play, because it takes a few minutes to solve each one. You can buy more puzzles using in-app purchases, but that's implemented in a strange way: you can only buy the "next" 13 puzzles, without being able to see a list of how many packs are available or their difficulty, and no option to buy multiple packs at a discount. I think this is something that needs to be addressed to allow the users to make informed purchases.

In the meantime, if you like strict logic puzzles, this is definitely one to 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.

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Review: Khaba for iPhone and iPad

Khaba by the Swedish Hello There was released last year, but I only played it recently. I was surprised by it because it has high production values, including full voice acting, but it is relatively unknown.

I downloaded the game while it was free for a couple of days. I promptly tweeted about that; make sure to follow me to not miss these opportunities!

I really enjoy the overall atmosphere and the mechanics of the puzzles. Unfortunately, it looks like most of the development effort went into the aesthetics and too little on usability testing.

The premises are a bit of a stereotypical B-movie plot, which doesn't make them less appealing. You are an explorer trapped in a pyramid, and need to use a beam of light to advance through it. Everything is presented in a top-down perspective view, rendered in full 3D, though the 3D is only for presentation because the puzzles are strictly bidimensional.

To control the beam you use some poles which, when struck by the light, can deflect it in any direction. There are also mirrors on the walls, which are fixed in place and can only be used to reflect the beam at a fixed angle.

In the image above you see two types of poles: the one in the center can only be rotated, while the other two (the most common) can both be rotated and moved around. There is also a third type which splits the beam in two.

When moving poles around, you are constrained by the environment. E.g. if there is a closed door, you can't move a pole through it unless you first open the door.

After warming up for a few levels, the game introduces its main mechanic: when the beam hits the blue orb, you can tap the button on the bottom left and enable an "alternate plane" of light. That starts a beam of blue light, and transforms the screen from this...

... to this.

There are two things to note in that image. The first is that, contrary to common physics, the blue beam cannot cross the yellow beam. So in the above example, to let the blue beam reach the left of the screen you'll need to make the yellow beam hit the orb from the other side.

The other thing to note is that when the alternate plane is enabled, three green scarabs appear. Your secondary objective is to touch all three scarabs at the same time with the blue light. When you do that, you'll learn more about the pharaoh's story, and if you do it for all levels you'll get a different ending at the end of the game.

As the game progresses, the levels become more and more complicated, containing glass doors that can only be crossed by light of the same color, and lots of switches to trigger. It's important to note that switches are of two different kinds: ones that need to be kept lit to keep the door open, and ones that need to be hit only once to permanently open the door. That's crucial to allow progression through a level.

There are 28 levels in total, but if you're thinking that's not many, think again: completing a single level requires many steps and takes several minutes. If you go for all three scarabs (which you definitely should), even more.

Having long levels is great, but in this case it's also a problem because your progress isn't saved: every time you launch the game, it starts again from the intro, and you have to go through the level selection menu, restarting the level from the beginning. This is an incredible oversight for a mobile game, and extremely annoying. Essentially, when you start playing, you'd better make sure to have enough time to finish a level.

But as annoying as that might be, it pales in comparison to how frustrating the controls are. Directing the beams often requires extreme precision, which is very hard to achieve given how the controls have been implemented.

First of all, every time you touch a pole the direction of the bem is reset to the position of your finger, which makes it impossible to do incremental adjustments. Second, as soon as you lift the finger, more often than not the beam direction will be altered, messing up your alignment and forcing you to do it again.

I'll not even mention how often you move a pole instead of rotating it, or the other way around, or you pick the wrong pole when there are two next to each other. Those are minor issues compared to the one above.

And all this is while playing on iPad Mini. I can imagine that the game must be totally unplayable on iPhone.

This is a huge issue. Such poor controls wouldn't have been adequate for an early prototype, let alone a published game.Since I'm not the only one to complain about this, I would have expected the developers to hurry to fix it. Instead, the only update in the past six months was just to add more languages.

I like this game, I really do; but I can't recommend spending money on it unless the controls are improved.

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: RGB Express for iPhone and iPad

RGB Express is captivating from the beginning. It has cute graphics and animations, an everyday theme that can be related with, and it just feels light and joyful.

The Finnish-German developer Bad Crane has clearly been targeting the young and casual audience with this game, and I think they've been quite successful. The mechanics are deeper than a simple casual game would require, but expert puzzlers will need a lot of perseverance before getting to the interesting parts.

You control some trucks on a city map. Your objective is to collect some colored boxes and bring them to their destination. You do that by drawing the paths that each truck should follow; when you are satisfied with the paths, you tap the Play button to check if the solution works or not.

The paths can cross, or touch in a corner, but you cannot pass through the same straight section of road more than once. This limitation implies that you cannot pass in front of a house without carrying a box addressed to it: the game immediately stops in that case, because it would not be possible to pass in front of the house a second time to deliver the package. Actually, as Federico Prat Villar showed me, this isn't entirely true, because when the house is in front of a 3-way junction you would be able to pass in front of it twice. But the game doesn't allow you anyway.

Also, there is a timing element because the trucks can crash into one another, so you have to be careful to not make two paths cross at the wrong moment.

The trucks can pick up more than one box at the same time, but no more than three. That's an important limitation in a few cases, where you might like to pick up four or five boxes at the same time and deliver them later.

The colored trucks can only deliver boxes to houses of their color, but they can pick up boxes of any color. There are also white trucks which can deliver boxes of any color. In that case, your load acts as a stack, so the last box picked up is the first to be delivered. You cannot pick a red and a green box and then pass in front of the red house: you need to deliver the green first.

Another element is movable bridges. When they are open, the trucks cannot pass over them. They are operated by buttons of the same color, found in other parts of the puzzle; sometimes there are two buttons, one to open and one to close.

The most interesting element is drop points at intersections. You can activate them while designing the solution. When they are active, the first truck that passes over them drops its top box, and the second truck picks it up again (of course, the game rules imply that no more than two trucks can pass through the same intersection). This allows you to exchange boxes of different colors.

The game sports 240 levels, but my main criticism is that most of the first half of them are nothing short of trivial, really too simple to be interesting.

There's nothing wrong in being easy, but even then, there should be some challenge, something that makes the player feel smart for finding the solution. When there is no perception of challenge, there is also no satisfaction for solving a puzzle. I didn't feel challenged at the beginning, because in many cases I could literally draw the first paths that I could think of and they would just work. It felt more like grinding than thinking. I kept playing, confident that eventually the puzzles would become more stimulating, but I would have preferred if the game contained half the levels but of higher average quality and with a better difficulty curve.

The first impact with the game has been carefully polished; I was impressed by details like the way how the clouds move in the city selection screen. I think some corners have been cut with the in-game animations, in particular when the trucks take a turn, which feels a bit jarring. I think there's also a bug in the animation of the bridges opening or closing. It doesn't look right.

The user interface is good, but it's intrinsically complicated because of the many paths that you might have to draw. It requires some precision so I found it a bit too difficult to control on a small screen. On iPad Mini it's a lot better. It still doesn't feel completely intuitive, and correcting paths often seems to require more taps than should be needed.

A very nice touch is that while you draw the path for one truck, the game shows how the other trucks will be moving along the paths you have already drawn. This makes it a lot easier to check that the timing is right and avoid crashes.

Overall, this game is entertainment for the whole family so it's an easy recommendation. Be warned that it might require some patience before it becomes really rewarding.

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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