IllusionLabs aren’t strangers to App Store success, with TouchGrind and Labyrinth just two of their titles that have been big hits they now attempt again with their new title Blast A Way. Blast A Way for iPhone and iPad is a colorful physics puzzler where your task is to rescue the 3 Boxies that have been left strewn across all 5 worlds and 80 levels.
So how do achieve this task? Its quite simple really, the answer is bombs! 6 different types of bombs to be exact that will blow things up, transport you, change colors and even rebuild previously exploded blocks. All of these actions will enable you to move around the levels and collect the previously mentioned Boxies who are stranded and are waiting for you to pick them up.
The physics of the game are pitch perfect. You navigate the levels with a variety of touch controls which allow you to zoom, rotate and focus on any area of the beautifully designed levels. You can then move your character by drawing a path for them to walk along and final you can throw a bomb by touching where you want it to land and choosing the angle to throw it.
Bomb placement is where the real skill is required, direction, angle and power will all influence the final location of the bomb and where the bomb lands will influence the effect that the bomb has on the Boxies, the environment and even you, especially if you are standing too close to the bomb when it explodes.
It’s nice that you aren’t restricted in the number of bombs that you have at your disposal especially as on some levels getting the bomb to where you need it to land can be pretty tricky.
The 5 worlds are themed on different materials including wood, metal, plastic and fabric and while the structure of the worlds are similar being all made out of a variety of geometric shapes the different materials make them look great. This is certainly the case on the retina displays of the iPhone 4S and the new iPad where they pop off the screen.
It’s frustrating that as a universal app there is no progression synchronization between devices and while there is Game Center integration the 7 achievements are a little disappointing and it would have been nice to see a little more creativity here.
Blast A Way is a wonderful new physics puzzler, at $4.99 it’s a little on the pricey side but you can always try 20 levels for free via Blast A Way Free to see if you like it before you buy it.
[rating: 4/5]
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The best way to describe Instaviz for those who don’t know about it is the description on the company’s own website :
Instaviz is an iPhone and iPad application that turns roughly sketched shapes and lines into beautifully laid-out diagrams. Instaviz uses Recog, a new shape recognition engine. Trained on over 2,500 sketches drawn by real users, Recog uses advanced fuzzy logic and sophisticated geometric algorithms to recognise what the user sketched in a split second.
Instaviz also uses Graphviz as its automated graph layout engine. The industry standard for automated graph layout, Graphviz represents over 20 years of AT&T Information Visualisation Research.
Review
The first thing I did with Instaviz was open up a blank worksheet and draw lots of circles, squares and other shapes and try to join them all together with increasingly convoluted lines and squiggles. Impressively most of the time the app managed to interpret the type of shapes, and the logic flow I was trying to create. A few minutes later with my insane Christmas Tree of numbered shapes and lines complete I got to work actually reviewing Instaviz! One day Touch Reviews will give me a game to review. But for a while Instaviz was quite fun, even though that’s not what I was supposed to do with it, and definitely not what the designers intended it for either I am sure!
Instaviz is a Universal app, which means that it can be installed on the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad as a single download from the App Store. It is in essence what I would call a flow chart creator. Some people call it a “diagram sketching app”. But its focus is on arranging geometric shapes (which can contain wording or simply numbers) into a logical tree or flow chart. So I find the use of the word diagram a little confusing. It would be hard work, for instance, to make a technical drawing with it. But it’s a piece of cake to design the flow of logic for a piece of code, or perhaps one of those graphs you see on a web site where you can decide if you should buy an iPad or not, or ask a girl out.
Instaviz’s impressive strength is the way that it intelligently rearranges your flowchart for an optimal layout, on the fly, as you add and remove new components. Watching boxes and lines reorganise when you’ve got your flowchart into a jumble, by not planning ahead sufficiently, is quite cathartic. I wish I had a widget to do that with C++ sometimes.
The iPad version of Instaviz allows users to sketch on the larger display of the iPad, and edit settings with the new popover controls available as part of the iPad’s enhanced iPhone OS. On the iPhone and iPod Touch you still have those controls, but they are in separate windows that slide over the main view intelligently when required. Unfortunately they then obscure your workspace. But both apps have the same basic features. What the iPad version does though is make good use of the newer more fully featured User Interface elements it has.
Having used Instaviz on the iPod and then compared it to the iPad version I can say that going back to the iPod is hard. This is not Pixelglow’s fault. The app works very well on both platforms. But you really appreciate the extra screen real-estate of the iPad, and the convenience of popover controls floating over your workspace, which allow you to see your graph while you update its components.
Instaviz allows you to create your flow charts from Ellipses, Circles, Rectangles, Squares, Diamonds and Triangles. It decides what shape you meant from the outline of a finger drawn sketch you make on the iPad’s screen. It rarely gets confused if you draw your shapes reasonably. But in any case it is simple to delete a wrong choice and redraw it. Most times I got “wrong shapes” was when I drew a wonky rectangle and it thought I wanted a diamond!
Joining shapes together with an arrow is as simple as sketching a line from one to the other. You can make those lines quite squiggly too. I tried to make several drunken bypasses around my congested city of rectangles, and Instaviz deftly did some town planning for me, and hey presto I had a flow chart that made sense again! Watching the shapes and lines animate into position smoothly almost makes you want to make bad designs so you can enjoy the animations.
To augment / edit shapes, and lines, you simply double tap on them to bring up a popover which you can use to label, number, add text, colour, change the outline, or change the orientation of any element where appropriate. So you can have squares with rounded edges, and a different fill colour. Or you can change the style of a line, or its direction. There are lot of options for colours, fonts, sizes, line thickness / stippling etc.
Instaviz starts up with some “Help” Graphs in the workspace menu which are a novel way to provide an in-app tutorial. You can see, and read about most features of the app in the style of the very flow charts it makes. A very elegant (but simple) way to get things across to the user, and also introduce the interface for navigating them
Instaviz works seamlessly in landscape or portrait. A must for this kind of app in my opinion. Any app I get that doesn’t do this gets a paddington hard stare from me these days. Be warned app developers. It also has nice pinch to zoom, as well as autoscaling features to make the best use of the screen space to show your entire graph, or parts you want to focus on. Again, on the iPad you simply have more space before you have to employ pinching and zooming.
Making new graphs is as simple as tapping a “+” button on the app’s main screen. It is equally simple to duplicate Graphs and share them as a Photo, Email or Export document. Duplicate is a nice touch, as you can easily try two or three different idea branches from a base project without having to repeat layout work, or export and then import.
Importing, or exporting, offers a plethora of options including box.net, iDisk, and http or https service access to transfer files in our out of the device.
There are also several formats supported for exporting graphs; Graphiz GV, Acrobat PDF, PNG or Visio VDX.
And the pricing is right. I wish more app developers would start looking at this kind of price range.
App developers take note : If you produce a quality app there is no reason that you can’t charge $9 or $10 for something like this.
Instaviz is well worth its sticker price. Heartily recommended. Even if you just want to make mad logic Christmas trees! I jest. I actually used Instaviz this weekend to flow chart a complex landscape scrolling algorithm for one of my own iPhone apps. And for that one serious application it has already paid for itself in my book.
The Good
The Not So Good
Price: $9.99 (iTunes Store Preview)
Updated: Apr 01, 2010
Reviewed Version: 1.6
Size: 3.2 MB
Languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish
Seller: Pixelglow Software
© 2008–2009 Pixelglow Software Pty. Ltd.
Rated 4+
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.
Finding myself reviewing yet another variation on the classic 3+ item match game I thought I would be short on inspiration to describe such a repeated concept. However Lines Deluxe from Colorbox proved to be a great addition to the flooded genre with twist on the style.
So if you’ve ever played this type of game you would not need any help on understanding what you need to do, however, for those of you who are living under a rock a brief description would be this. Simply get a horizontal line of matching pieces and they disappear, repeat, repeat, repeat until you can’t move any more pieces and it’s game over and time to compare your score to not only your previous scores but also the global leader-boards.
With that being said, lets get into a little more detail! Lines Deluxe is played on a 9 x 9 grid and you start with a handful of playing pieces randomly scattered across the it. The playing pieces consist of a range of brightly colored spheres with geometric shapes on them. To align the pieces your only option is to move the existing pieces with new pieces add to the board each time you move a piece without it resulting in the completion of a line of spheres.
The pieces that are going to appear after the next move are high-lighted on the playing area so that you can use that as a guide as to where your next move should be. You are limited in moving your pieces only to spaces that you can get to without jumping over any other pieces and that’s where your forward thinking will come into play as you try to ensure that the lines you are building don’t get blocked off.
The simplest thing to do is to create lines of 5 shapes, however, while this is relatively easy to do the rewards are limited in that you will only score 5 points and no power ups. You can complete lines up to and including 9 playing pieces and the bigger the lines the bigger the rewards. From a points perspective you’ll get 5, 10, 15, 20 & 25 points for each additional sphere you can add to your line and then progressively better and better power-ups too.
Power-ups include the ability to destroy a single sphere, the eight spheres surrounding the power-up sphere, all pieces in the same line both horizontally and vertically and the ability to destroy all the playing pieces of one color. The power-up balls can only move in the same way as the standard playing pieces so again it’s key to ensure that you don’t get them blocked in. Use them well though and you’ll soon be racking up big scores and preventing the premature end to your game.
The graphics, animations and sound effects all look polished and working well together and makes Lines Deluxe great to look at as well as great to play.
The games are split into two modes and three styles. The two modes to choose from are Classic and Extreme, Extreme includes the power-up options while Classic does not. The three styles are Endurance, just you and your tactics, Time Race where you play against the clock and finally Tactic where extra initial pieces are added to the grid to make things a little more difficult for you. All in all you have 6 different games styles all of which have there own local and global high score boards for you to rank yourself.
Despite the number of similar titles available in the App Store I found Lines Deluxe to be an addictive puzzler with all of the basics working together to produce a quality game that produces many hours of puzzling fun. The satisfaction of clearing a line of 9 spheres is something that keeps me coming back for more over and over again.
Price: $.99 as of Jan 03, 2010 (iTunes Store Link)
Version reviewed 1.0.0
The Good
The Not So Good
Reviewed by: Craig Willis
Lines Deluxe Official iPhone/iPod touch Trailer
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Polyhedra [rating: 3.5/5]
“Another puzzle game” I hear you cry, “my iPhone is already full of puzzle games, why should I get another one?”, well I’ll tell you, if you have an iPhone/iPod touch full of puzzle games you must obviously like them, and secondly it’s only 2 bucks so what have you got to lose? If that hasn’t got you interested already, read on, if you are interested also read on!
The aim of Polyhedra is to fill a given percentage of the screen with geometric shapes, sounds simple enough right? Well obviously it’s not that easy. Firstly you only have a certain number of shapes to use, secondly, there are a multitude of enemies hell bent on stopping you from building your shapes. The whole game can be played with a single finger so that makes controls pretty simple. Touching the screen creates your shape and the longer you hold your finger down the larger it grows, don’t let one of the enemies that are bouncing around the screen touch the shape that you are creating though as it will kill it and reduce the number of shapes that you have at your disposal by one.
You start with circles and as you complete enough levels you get to unlock squares, pentagons, hexagons and more with your high scores all being uploaded to the Agon leaderboards which is a portal for Polyhedra and other games too. The psychedelic backgrounds create quite a colorful experience and with the simplicity of the game play the balance works well.
A ‘Toy Box’ has been added where you can play with all the geometric shapes just for fun to create you own pictures, but it doesn’t really add anything to the game and most of my time was spent playing the game rather than playing in the Toy Box.
Polyhedra is a relatively short game but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in simplicity and fun.
Price $1.99
The Good
The Not So Good
Reviewed By: Craig Willis
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Polyhedra iPhone Gameplay
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