TransPlan

I really want to give this game a good review. I did enjoy certain puzzles where there was a rube goldberg type of chaining going on, but unfortunately the negatives outweigh the positives for me. That said, I'm really rather neutral on the game but wanted to put this as a negative review so that people know that there are serious flaws and it's not simply a "Brilliant physics puzzler" as the top review currently states. Pros: + fun art style and music + when it works it works well and can be quite satisfying. there were a couple puzzles which just came together beautifully and I even replayed those levels to see it again. Cons: - Outcomes are nondeterministic: If you do the same exact thing twice, you WILL get different results. Often those results are the difference between a solution working and not working. In a physics puzzler, this is an absolutely HUGE deal. Likewise, the Undo doesn't completely revert to the previous state and will often leave you in a slightly in-between-moves state. This means a lot of redoing to get something that works which makes it feel like you're cheesing your solution. You can also exploit the broken Undo to get a solution that would otherwise not be possible. - The physics are based on actual physics, so there's gravity and momentum, but there are noticeable gaps where things don't behave according to how you'd expect. The most jarring for me was a solution that required you to exploit the wonky physics to make one rectangular block turn while another square block flips to stay on top of the rectangular turning block. That was the only time I used a hint in the game and it left quite a bitter taste. Outside of that one puzzle, it's more quibbles than actual annoyances. - The menu system is absolutely terrible: there's about ten different tabs for different puzzles but you have to navigate between them in really odd non-intuitive ways and can't access a single list. it tries to be nonlinear and give the player options, but really is just confusing. You can't just select 'next puzzle' from the main menu and it doesn't remember what you were working on last so you have to find it in the maze of options. Neutral: * Very short: about two hours total with the newly released Master II puzzles. But it's cheap, so I won't fault it for this. * The vast majority of the puzzles are trivial tutorial-esque puzzles that hand-hold you though the solution. Only a few will require more than a couple minutes to work through. Of the puzzles that are nontrivial, about half of them require guessing or trial-and-error to find what esoteric solution the designer thought would be really difficult to figure out (it is and it's not fun). The other half are the good ones where you can concoct a plan, have that plan mostly work or mostly fail, tweak things, and finally achieve your goal. It winds up feeling more like "what did the developer expect me to do?" than "what can I figure out that will work?". Overall, I'd say it's a solid 5/10. If it was deterministic, I'd give it a 7/10. A bit more of the fun puzzles would be an easy 9.