Puzzle Domino
Score: 45% ESRB: Not Rated Publisher: 415 Games Developer: 415 Games Media: Download/1 Players: 1 Genre: Puzzle
Graphics & Sound: Puzzle Domino is one of the few games I've downloaded for my fairly new iPhone, and the only one that wasn't already attached to a big name already (i.e. Mass Effect: Galaxy, Jewel Quest 2), and quite frankly, it doesn't do a lot to impress me on the quality of independent game development for iPhones and iPod Touches. As for the game's visuals, what it offers is simple but effective and definitely gets the job done. When the game starts, you are presented with your standard Tetris-style board and the domino pieces that fall from it are nice, clean sprites and exactly what you would expect. Unfortunately, as far as the game's presentation is concerned, this is the best aspect because the game's audio qualities are severely lacking. Now, I will be the first to admit that I don't have the best ear when it comes to music. I'm all but tone deaf (some would say completely tone deaf), and generally view background music and such as a necessary aspect of games that I simply accept as being there. So for me to complain about a game's music has got to mean something, right? First off, the background music is overly-energetic and quite frankly, grating. Rather than giving players the calming tunes that most puzzle games offer, Puzzle Domino goes for a louder and rougher sound. But even so, that isn't that game's biggest problem in this department. Instead, there are numerous technical issues that plague Puzzle Domino's sound. The main one involves whether or not the background music even plays. If I had something else playing when I started the App, sometimes the game's background music wouldn't turn on and I would be allowed to continue listening to my music. Other times, the game would turn off my tunes and start up its own blaring sounds. Other times, all music would be turned off and all I had in my ears were the game's sound effects and still other times, the music I was listening to would start and stop seemingly randomly. Let's just say that this was severely disappointing and I just got to the point where I would make sure I wasn't listening to anything when I booted the game up and then simply turned down the iPhone's volume while playing.
Gameplay: Puzzle Domino has a basic falling-blocks style gameplay where your goal is to match three or more like tiles in order to cause them to be destroyed. The only real twist here is that the falling blocks are domino pieces, so instead of matching colored blocks, you are matching tiles marked one through six. Puzzle Domino attempts to add a few more twists to this basic gameplay in order to spice things up a bit, but that's the basics and quite frankly, there are enough issues with this basic concept to make you wish the developers had spent a bit more time with the game's core mechanics before adding these extra layers. So what are these issues? Well, the main one I found, and the most annoying in my opinion, was the fact that when you laid down a piece that could match three or more in multiple directions (say vertical and horizontal), only one direction would actually collapse. Most games reward the player for making such a move by at least allowing all valid directions to collapse, even if it doesn't give you extra points or multipliers. The reason why this was so annoying was due mainly to the fact that it's a simple issue to fix, and how a game of this style should react to this scenario has become fairly standard. In the end, this bit feels more like sloppy coding than intended behavior. The other issues I found with the game came from the aforementioned extra layers. Instead of going through an endless series of white domino pieces, at some point, the white pieces will stop and black ones will fall. Only black pieces match black tiles, so whatever is on the board at the time stays there and you are left working around pieces that cannot be destroyed. Eventually, the white tiles reappear, but instead of keeping the black ones on the board like it did with the white ones, all black tiles are destroyed at once. There are a couple of reasons I found this annoying. For one, I couldn't find any indication or documentation as to what conditions caused this switch to occur. I think, but can't be sure, it has something to do with your score. The other reason I found this annoying was because the game's rules on what happens during a color swap simply weren't constant. If the white tiles were destroyed when the black ones appeared, things would be fine. I would just chalk it up to going up a level or something. If the black ones weren't destroyed when the white ones reappeared, then I would just think it was a part of the strategy you have to deal with, and the need to keep your domino pieces as low as possible was even more important. Instead, the current setup just adds an odd gameplay mechanic that simply doesn't feel right.
Difficulty: Puzzle Domino is as hard as you make it. The more you play the game, the better you get at arranging the tiles to not only clear the most pieces the quickest, but also to take into consideration that you might suddenly be faced with the black domino pieces and be unable to get rid of your bottom layers. But, even with the amount of practice I put into this game, I found that the game got noticeably tougher by the time the black pieces came around again. I don't think this has anything to do with a change in the game or anything (with the possible exception of a speed increase that seems to always hit around this time), but this is usually the time when my domino pieces are stacked pretty high and I simply can't last any longer. By the time of this writing, I was averaging a good 10 to 15 minutes of gameplay before my pieces hit the top. I would say that isn't very good for a block-falling game, but I am going cut Puzzle Domino a bit of slack here since it is designed for a mobile device and lengthy gameplay sessions aren't as required or favorable in this environment.
Game Mechanics: Puzzle Domino takes full advantage of the iPhone/iPod Touch's touch screen. Moving your falling tiles left or right on the board is as simple as dragging your finger in the direction you want it to go. If you want to rotate the pieces to the right, tap to the right of the screen, rotating left means tapping on the other side. If you want the piece to fall down quicker, you simply hold your finger to the screen, and if you want to slam it, simply swipe your finger down. One of the game's advantages is it's basic pickup and play controls, and the tutorial that is available walks you through all of these commands so if you don't have it when you first go to play, that will definitely walk you through it. All in all, I think the developers had a good idea in this game, but the basic technical or design issues found throughout it make it hard to truly appreciate. The game costs about four dollars, and while that isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things, there are other games that are better and cheaper (both Mass Effect: Galaxy, Jewel Quest 2 among them).
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Dawn of Discovery Roogoo Attack!