Game review: Cogs - iPhone / iPod Touch (From Your Local Guardian)

Game review: Cogs - iPhone / iPod Touch

5:02pm Tuesday 2nd February 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

After what has been a lean couple of months for decent new iPhone and iPod Touch releases the App Store machine is starting to move full steam ahead once again.

Publisher Chillingo’s latest game, developed by Lazy 8 Studios, is a fantastic puzzle game called Cogs, which manages to be both vintage and innovative at the same time.

The gameplay will be instantly familiar if you ever played any sliding tile puzzles as a kid – the sort where you move jumbled tiles around on a board to try and complete a picture or arrangement of numbers.

Cogs gives this old formula a fresh twist by adding mechanical elements to the puzzles.

Each of the increasingly complex challenges sets the task of building a machine for achieving a specific objective such as powering a prop, striking a chime or turning a crank.

You are then given a sliding tile puzzle containing various components such as gears, pipes, hammers and balloons. You must find the required configuration to solve each level.

Some of the puzzles are presented on single 2D boards while others are 3D, requiring multiple sides of a rotatable cube to be correctly arranged, a bit like solving a Rubik’s cube.

In inventor mode the puzzles are worked through one at a time, your performance on each earning stars based on time taken and number of moves used. These awards unlock new puzzles.

In challenge mode you can choose to replay previously completed puzzles with either a time limit or a maximum number of moves.

The puzzles are neither stupidly simple nor infuriatingly hard, the difficulty level finding a happy medium where your reward for logic and clever thinking is a satisfying sense of fulfilment as the last piece of the puzzle slides into place.

The learning curve is steady so you will always feel ready for the next challenge when it comes along.

The gameplay in Cogs is ingenious. I was never a fan of sliding puzzles as a kid. In fact I found them boring and frustrating. However, the mechanical and construction elements in Cogs make these puzzles fun.

The puzzle solving is enhanced by some great design work.

Everything in Cogs looks and works fantastically well.

The touch controls for sliding the puzzle tiles around are smooth and responsive.

The visual presentation of the game is first-class, from graphics for the puzzles to menus and on-screen buttons.

And the laid-back, whimsical in-game music, which even features the sounds of moving machinery, sets the perfect tone for creativity.

The pricing structure for Cogs is quite unusual.

Paying 59p gets you the game and its first 10 levels. Additional levels are then available in four packs of 10 for 59p each.

This means the whole game will cost less than £3 but downloading it in chunks won’t appeal to everyone.

I would say that overall Cogs offers excellent value with a nice variety of puzzles and two game modes.

The game can be completed quite quickly if you breeze through all the puzzles but you will almost certainly want to go back and revisit finished levels to reduce your times and moves taken. There are also online leaderboards and achievements.

Cogs is a great game for anyone who wants to give their brain a workout or who wants to play one of the best presented puzzle games available in the App Store.

Verdict: 9 out of 10 – An impressively challenging, stylish and satisfying puzzle game.