iPhone game of the day: All-in-1Logic Gamebox

Game: All-in-1 Logic Gamebox
Price: $0.99 / £0.59
Size: 25.9MB
Download it now from itunes store:US/UK

You can learn almost everything you need to know about All-in-1 Logic Gamebox by reading the title. First, check out the “All-in-1” – this implies various puzzle types, and in fact there are seven different genres of head-scratcher on offer. “Logic” clues you in to what kind of puzzles these are. There’s a bit of quick-tapping and arithmetic here and there, but it’s mostly the kind of sliding puzzles, mazes, and other spatial arrangement challenges that you’ll find in games like the Professor Layton series. And “Gamebox” communicates both the volume of puzzles – we played more than 600 and we still hadn’t unlocked everything – and their straightforward, understated presentation. There’s no wild plot, no nutty characters, no zany anything. Just puzzles by the gigaton.

Two of our favorites were Liquid Measure, which finds you arranging pipes to fill tubs of water without overflowing, and Parking Lot, the ages-old “get the car out of gridlock” valet game. Also cool was Flip It, a vaguely Othello-like experience in which you’re presented with a grid of tiles, each with a light and dark side, which flip over in groups when you tap the screen. You’ve got to tap the right spots in the right order to make the light side show on each tile. And our personal fave was Telescope, in which you use extendable poles to push and pull a ball into a hole.

Not everything is as strong. Arithmetic was our least favorite puzzle type – the only thing worse than math is math with a timer attached. And two other games were victimized by the touch controls. Paratroopers is a manic race to tap as many skydiving cartoon soldiers as you can, triggering their ‘chutes to open before they plummet into terra firma – but it often failed to sense our touch, so either the tap detection is off or it requires superhuman precision.

Finally, Labyrinth is an interesting take on mazes – you’re given oddly shaped arrangements of squares and told to drag your finger through all of the squares without crossing your path. But it’s tough to hit the square you want at times because your finger is blocking your view. This isn’t a gamebreaker though, because you can play the puzzles in any order – so we just ignored the types that weren’t doing it for us. And given that there were hundreds of puzzles we did like, we still feel we got far, far more than our dollar’s worth. You will too.

Nov 22, 2010

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