Review: Revolve

Score:
70%

Author: Fluid Pixel

Version Reviewed: 1.00 (0)

Buy Link | Download / Information Link

This mix of "Newtonian physics" and "maze with one exit door" is a great mobile game. You’re presented with a square box on the screen which has a red marble and an exit hole in a typically awkward place. It’s awkward because walls have been placed inside the box.

All you need to do is rotate the box to move the marble around, of course, with gravity pulling the marble towards the bottom of the box,  making sure it gets to the exit in as few rotations as possible. Unlike the marble maze games, the rotation is in 90 degree steps, rather than the fine control that you’ve seen in games where you tilt the screen to roll your marble around.

This makes Revolve much closer to a puzzle game than a twitchy reaction-based arcade game, and I think it’s far better for it. It’s certainly to my liking. Over the seventy levels there’s a good mix of obvious solutions that can be done in a few moves, and more complicated levels that need a careful eye and a bit of planning.

 

Rather than use the accelerometer on your smartphone, Revolve makes use of the touch screen to spin the game board around. This isn’t as intuitive as you think - a swipe of your finger to the right will spin it clockwise, while a swipe left moves it anti-clockwise. This takes a bit of getting used to, as I was originally doing a circular movement on the screen, and that didn’t quite work as I thought it would. The key (for my mind) is to imagine you are grabbing the top of the board and moving that around.

While the solitary help screen for Revolve does show you a finger moving around the screen, it’s still not clear what’s going on. For the next version, Fluid Pixel need to concentrate on improving the first few minutes of the whole game, perhaps with a tutorial level that also tells you what and where to press and swipe.

Putting that one issue aside, this is a game that looks good and needs just enough thought from the user to make it worthwhile. It never feels “on rails” like some puzzle games can, but at the same time there’s enough leeway given that you can easily make a mess of a level, especially if you’re gunning for the minimum number of rotations possible target.

I don’t think that it’ll take more than a week or so to finish the bundled levels in Resolve, even if you just play it sporadically on the way to work – each level can be worked out by working backwards from the exit hole until you get to the marble’s starting location. While this might make Revolve sound little more than an exercise, it does mean that, unlike other puzzle games, it’s unlikely that you’ll be completely stumped by one frustrating level.

Revolve is a good puzzle game, and the sort of application that you find a lot of on a successful mobile platform – it uses the technology on the platform well, it looks nice, works as advertised, and you'd be happy to show it off to others.

-- Ewan Spence, October 2010.

Reviewed by Ewan Spence at 14:32 UTC, October 19th 2010