I write this review having reached level 52.
The game is a nice concept, get a ball from point A to point B, avoinding the traps, and using various gadgets to guide the ball.
The first 10 levels are tutorials, which is not so bad. They are introduced by a robot guide who outputs some text which contains component descriptions and the goal to achieve. It's during these tutorials that you realise how frustrating the controls are, more on this later.
Following the first 10 levels you're cut loose, and left to work it out for yourself. Every level is introduced by the robot guide. I think the guide is supposed to offer some kind of storyline, or perhaps it's suppossed to be an attempt at humour. The text has been garbled, and it rarely makes a great deal of sense and doesn't really add to the gameply. It becomes frustrating as you spend several minutes trying to see what the garbled words were supposed to be. This behaviour is passed off by the robot claiming there is some kind of problem - well it is a problem, a sense of humour failure on its part, ha, see what I did there?
At the beginning of each level you see start point, end point, and various obstacles along the way. You move the mouse towards the edge of the screen to pan around. The scroll wheel zooms in an out. Panning is slow, and cumbersome. Zooming does not centre on the point, but the centre of the screen. Given that panning makes it near impossible to get something centred makes zooming awkward. There are two options for the camera, free movement, or locked onto the ball, the latter is useless when placing parts.
In order to place part you need to open the inventory. And this is another frustration, you have to open the inventory every single time you want to place a part. This becomes tedious, especially when there is nothing to be gained from having the inventory close. The inventory needs to be permanently open. Anyone who has played Incredible Machine or similar will understand this. Having the invetory closed makes it difficult to assess how to design the solution for the level, so the first thing you'll do at the beginning of each level is open the invetory to see what parts you have.
Placing the parts in the level is a matter of clicking the part and moving it in to the level and placing it. There are certain tiles that prevent placment, which adds to the difficulty. Parts can be rotated, by right-clicking. To finally place the part a single-left click is required. When a part is selcted two icons appear on the part, on the left a crosshair, and on the right an "X". The crosshair is clicked if you want to move the part, the X is clicked if you want to delete the part. Once you've placed the part, the icons don't always disappear, so you're never sure if it is still being interacted with, and frustratingly, half of the time the control of the part has not been released, so you inadvertanly move or rotate the part. Reslecting a part is a matter of left-clicking in the level. This does not always work, for about a third of the time. It then requires you to reset the level to get rid of parts, or re-position them. The conrols are terrible.
The level design starts out as you'd expect, progressing gradually harder. I'm not sure what happenes to the level design after level 27, but it seems to flip-flop between one or two really tough puzzles, to some ridiculously easy challengs. Somewhere nearing level 50, all I had to do was place several jumps to ensure the ball crossed gaps in that path, nothing more complated than that. Previous levels to this point had required direction changes and speed changes. Another element introduced about level 30 was the requirement to collect a ring in order to complete the level. At this point I thought, ah, this is where the real challenges begin. But, no, collection of the ring has been required once so far in all the 52 levels I have played. Another frustration with the levels is that the phyics sometime goes a little screwy, where one run through will see the ball behave completely differently to another run through, despite no changes taking place. I once had my ball cataputled far off screen, yet when I ran the level again, it behaved as expected.
There is no guide to what the perfect solution is, in fact I've completed some levels without using all the parts and was left wondering if I was supposed to or not. There could have been an additional elemaent of challenge here, giving points or star reward depending on how many parts you used.
At levels 52 the assortments of parts and obstacles is very limited, and the levels all fairly small, so I don't see the complexity increasing, only my frustrations as the game misbehaves and I fight with the controls.
The visuals are nice, and so is the accompanying audio. Unfortunately there are way too many frustations and bugs to make me want to complete this game, which is a shame, becuase it could have been a gem, but falls far short.
