iPhone and iPod Touch Games Round-up 6

iBlast Moki

Developer: Godzilab
Price (as reviewed): £1.79 from the AppStore

Like other iPhone favourite Rolando, iBlast Moki’s colourful graphics and cheerfully smiling blobs may imply that it’s a bit of children’s game, but underneath the smiley faces there’s actually an incredibly challenging puzzle game.

The premise for iBlast Moki is simply to use a limited number of bombs and other devices to catapult the eponymous mokis (those sleepy-faced blobby things) into red vortexes that mark the end of the level. It’s as easy as that, in premise at least.

iBlast Moki itself isn’t at all easy though and as more and more explosive tools are dropped into your arsenal then the levels start to demand increasingly refined timing and skilful bomb placements. It takes a steady hand and patient brain to figure out the correct route for some puzzles, while other levels are obvious but require fuses that are accurate to the millisecond.


The level of precision that’s needed does create problems, as an otherwise sound solution can appear to be wrong if you’re even slightly wrong and the process of honing your route can be a bit fiddly and, well, dull. iBlast Moki doesn’t claim to be a particularly easy or fast-paced game though and in some respects it’s enormously refreshing to see a game like this on the iPhone. It’s obvious that the developers have done what they can to make the game as forgiving as possible too, rounding off corners in the architecture and keeping levels free of unnecessary obstacles.

Still, while iBlast Moki is on the surface seems to have mass appeal, it’s tough to get around the fact that it’s tryingly vexing at points – which makes the full product bear more than a passing resemblance to the likes of Lemmings. It’s doubtlessly worth a look if you’re after a truly puzzling puzzler, especially given the amount of levels, but casual gamers who want something to fill a bus ride would be better off looking elsewhere. Try looking below, for example.

Verdict: A shiny gloss covers an often frustrating game, but neither is a reason to utterly discount iBlast Moki if you want a new puzzle game.

Fling

Developer: CandyCane Apps
Price (as reviewed): £0.59 from the AppStore

Like iBlast Moki, Fling couches it’s complexity in a design which is full of anthropomorphised blobs and, also like iBlast Moki, it can be incredibly difficult. Where Fling differs though is when it comes to the actual pace of the puzzles and in the manner they’re solved. Fling doesn’t require your timing to be perfect, it just needs you to engage your brain.

Set on a grid that’s viewed from above, Fling is a board-clearing game where players have to flick the furry balls at each other and knock them off the screen in a minimum number of moves. The twist comes in the fact that balls can only travel in straight lines and they have to hit another ball, so they can’t just be discarded with a prod. When balls do collide then the one that was moving will stop, passing the momentum and direction onto the one it hit like a Newton’s cradle.

It sounds easy, but the puzzles quickly scale up and get pretty formidable through some clever positioning of the balls. To quote the old proverb; you’re only allowed to have a single ball on the table at the end of the game, not two, so you sometimes end up having to restart a level before you stumble on the right answer.

There are a few different modes to try your hand at in Fling –a survival mode and one which pits you against the clock, but our favourite is the standard solve-to-continue game type that lets you progress through the staggering number of levels without a time limit. Either way, the game caters to all levels of skill and has 19 difficulty settings, making progression fairly paced.

Rounded out with a handy level creator, Fling is a delightful and infuriating puzzle game at the same time that has oodles of levels to try your hand at.

Verdict: Incredibly addictive, Fling is the perfect pick-up-and-play puzzle game and one suited to almost any type of iPhone gamer.