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| Flip Disc by Chillingo |
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I know what you’re thinking. Puzzle games are a dime a dozen on the iPhone. Oh, and those color matching games? They seem to have the same problem. So why should I care about another color matching puzzle game? Well, probably because Flip Disc is fast, furious, and a whole lot of fun. And it looks and sounds good, to boot. The bad part is that there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of it, because it was released amidst of flood of high profile titles from Chillingo, and didn’t quite get the publicity that the rest of the games did. I’m here to give it a little publicity.
Normally I’d start by talking about the game play, but with Flip Disc the first thing you’ll notice is the music. From the opening rift that makes you think a Final Fantasy video will follow to the main menu track which feels like you’re headed into a full on action game, the music is incredibly well done. There are at least five or six different tracks that I’ve noticed so far, which is amazing for most any kind of mobile game, let alone a puzzle game. So the real question is: does Flip Disc really deserve this audio excellence? Personally, I’d say yes!
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At a very base level you could describe Flip Disc as a “match the colored gems” game. However, that would be doing Flip Disc a great disservice. Sure the point of the game is to match up colored gems, but gone is the cliché square playing area that we’re used to ad nauseam. Instead you have a series of five concentric discs. You move between the discs using either on screen up and down arrows, or by swiping up to move outwards and down to move inwards within the group of circles. You may also need to rotate the discs clockwise or counterclockwise, which again can be accomplished with onscreen buttons or by using the appropriate swiping gestures. There are eight rows that are continually being filled with gems from the top down. As the game progresses the gems flow faster and faster. It’s your job to rotate the discs such that a given row contains all of the same colored gems. Sound simple? Yeah, right…
Once you get a row that contains 5 of the same color gem (or 4 gems and the joker multi-colored gem), the row disappears and you get 10 points. If you can clear multiple rows at one time you get bonus points. If the board fills up, the game is over. Along the way you’ll get various helper gems that act much the same as the joker gem in terms of taking on the “color” of the given row. However, they also have special effects once the row has been completed. For example, one gem temporarily suspends the creation of new gems, while another gem will destroy all gems on the same disc that it’s on. On the other hand there’s the black gem that can’t be used to form lines at all. You’ll have to keep shuffling this one around until it goes away.
Between the two control schemes I found the on screen buttons much easier to use. The problem with the swiping motion is that sometimes it seems to register the opposite of what your intentions were. This isn’t such an issue at the beginning of the game, but as gems start to fill up and flow faster I find myself making a lot more mistakes using the swipe controls. Of course the bigger problem is on my end, in the fact that I’m not quite fast enough to keep up with the game mentally, but that’s not something the developer can fix! For really skilled players you might find the 10 level cap a down side, but for players like me that’s not an issue. I won’t even bother sharing my abysmally low “high score” so far.
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Graphically the game is very polished. There’s nothing extraordinary about the imagery, but it’s solid and all fits together well. Given the nature of the game there’s not much in the way of splashy special effects either, but that’s fine. It’s clear that care went into making the graphics that are there, and that’s good enough for a puzzle game.
If you like puzzle games and are tired of the same old clones over and over again, Flip Disc would be a good choice for you. The circular playing field gives Flip Disc a new spin to a tested genre, and there’s plenty of challenge to the game. Casual puzzle gamers might not be quite as enthused, but at 99 cents it’s probably worth the risk. Can you become the next Flip Disc Master?
Overall Score: 9/10
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