iPhone and iPod Touch Games Round-up 6

Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor

Developer: Tiger Style Games
Price (as reviewed): £1.79 from the AppStore

We’ll a little late in catching up to this title, which was put together by some of the same developers that worked on PC classics like Thief, but that hasn’t spoiled the attraction of this quaint arcade adventure game. If anything, it’s made it all the sweeter.

Playing as a tiny spider, players progress through an abandoned mansion that once belonged to the Bryce family with each level a new room of the house. Progression is achieved by eating the many flies, bugs and moths that now fill the abode, which you do by drawing lines on the screen to create webs.

Any closed geometric shape you weave across a level fills itself in to become a web and you’re only limited by the amount of webby resin you have left in your carapace, which you can replenish by feeding on more flies. In fact, the only way to die is to use up all your thread and not eat - which is a lot harder to do than you'd think.


This all sounds incredibly simple, but it’s therein that Spider’s charm lies; that the actual controls are so basic that you don’t really need to think about them. The game is so incredibly easy that you spend most of the time concentrating on the intricately decorated levels and the story that’s told through the game backgrounds. The family photos that litter the living room, the gravestones in the garden and the contents of the kitchen sink all allow you to put together a strangely compelling story in piecemeal.

Putting the clues together isn’t just a matter of curiosity either, as there are plenty of secret areas and even a few hidden rooms to uncover if you’re determined enough – and the difficulty there is much higher than that in the rest of the game.

Spider’s main weakness though is in the lack of replay value because, once you’ve cracked the mystery of the Bryce family and found all the hidden areas then there’s only really a few achievements and highscores to motivate you into playing again. There is a free spin-off game which introduces a survival mode, called Hornet Smash, and which acts as a demo for the full game – but it’s a shame that there’s so little longevity in the main title.

Verdict: An interesting and surprisingly thoughtful platformer, Spider is sure to appeal to those who prize quality over quantity.

Geared

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

Yet another puzzle game that seems oh-so-simple on the surface but which is actually quite devilish beneath the surface, Geared is a lovely little game for the mechanics in all of us.

At the start of each level there’s a spinning yellow gear in one corner and a stationary blue gear in the other corner and at the bottom of the screen are a bunch of spare cogs for you to connect the two with, at which point you’re moved on to the next level.

Geared does get a bit more difficult as you progress through the many levels, adding in areas of the board where you can’t pin cogs and giving you only awkward sizes to work with, but the main difficulty actually stems from the interface. Geared’s UI has a fair few nuances and niggles that can make it a pain to play with, especially when it comes to gear placement.

The most aggravating of this problems is the fact that you have to use the last gear you got out before you use another one, so if you’ve not left quite enough space to squeeze a wheel in then you often need to put all the cogs away and try again instead of just tweaking what you have. Couple that with the fact that cogs will fall according to gravity if they aren’t propped against something and the later levels can get incredibly frustrating, while the earlier levels are merely insultingly easy.

Geared itself is actually a really good game though, which is what makes these problems all the more frustrating. The concept behind the game is sound and the graphics are clear and eye-catching – it’s just these little quirks that crop up which damage the game. Often you can figure out how to solve a puzzle instantly but end up getting stuck for ages purely because you need to place wheels far more accurately than the iPhone easily allows. Or maybe we just have fat fingers.

Verdict: A fun game at first, Geared eventually turns sour because of a few tiny control issues that make completion a chore.