STEVE MILES·MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2019
There is many a time, whilst walking through particularly horrible wet and windy weather, that your mind slips into that mental dreamlike visionary state of golden sandy beaches, with breeze lightly filtering through palm tree leaves, whilst you lie on your sun-lounger near crystal clear sea, sipping a pina colada!
Unfortunately such visions are sadly non existent,like the mazes, in Island Maze. A puzzler where you must attempt to reach an island portal in the least moves possible, as a rotating cube!
Of course,any kind of story is missing here for starters. There is though, a very soothing meditative soundtrack playing throughout and graphically everything is clearly drawn out, with trigger buttons to rotate the camera, that allows the player to plan out the route to the portal accordingly and any hazards or puzzles in the way.With just 28 levels/islands in the game, this may appear to be a short time spent here, but what apparently materialises as early as the second level, is that things get complex pretty quickly with just a cube on an island.
Coloured key type jewels have to be rolled upon on the correct face of the cube, and then that face landed on the corresponding coloured floor tile, in order to progress onto the portal and complete the level.On the wrong face and landing on the tile results in the cube breaking up and having to restart again, as does rolling off the island into the sea!
You will spend a lot of time, just busy moving back and forth across the available island space, just trying to get the right face positioned to land at the right time. This could prove to be an exciting endeavour for some,yet with further progression in levels adding more colour key jewels and more tiles into the mix, things become tiresome and frustrating pretty quick.
You can’t argue that the developers didn’t try to mix things up here. There are further additions like adding rows of magnets to your cube face in order to stick to walls, and more hazards materialise like renegade cubes to block your path. Complete each level in a certain number of moves will grade your level with up to 3 gold marks. It is important to get decent scores as there is a set amount of gold marks needed to unlock further levels, should you persevere and not feel frustration or the need to just give up! Unfortunately, this reviewer was in the latter as there wasn’t a great deal to get excited about.
If you are a puzzle addict then at the low price, there may be something to gain from this purchase as it certainly gets challenging rather quickly, but I’m probably correct in believing that the tedium of rotating a cube will lose interest by most players at some point in the game..
Fair, but nothing aMAZEing!
Thanks to Drageus Games for the code.
