Review: Freecell (Offscreen Technologies)
Score:
65%
Offscreen are developers with a certain reputation for their single screen applications with very narrow functionality, but while that may have been the case at the start of their run of releases, they do deserve a second look. And while looking for some nice card games for the latest Symbian powered devices, I came across their version of Freecell. It’s still as close to a single screen application as it could be, but now there’s a menu screen and a game screen. And a lot of gameplay.
Version Reviewed: 1.30 (0)
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For those of you not familiar with Freecell, you have all 52 cards dealt face up, and you can stack down by opposite colour (red 8 – black 7 – red 6 – etc). This is so you can clear to the Aces, put them on the side, and build up in suit order on the aces. The catch is you can only move one card at a time. To help move bigger lines of cards you need to move single cards to one of four free spaces (cells) and then back into the playing field. While not every shuffled deck of Freecell can be solved, the percentage of solvable levels is incredibly high (around thirteen deals in a million are not solvable), so in practice you’re unlikely to be defeated by the deck – just your own ham-fisted playing skills.
In practice this means that there are very few options to play around with. Thankfully there’s not a lot you can alter in Freecell. Unlike other patience style games, there are no alternative rules to implement or common tweaks to gameplay. Yes, it might be nice to change the graphic on the back of the playing cards or the playing field, but it’s not vital.
The game itself fits nicely on the nHD screen, and while the smaller 3.2" screen can make it quite hard to touch a certain card in a list to move it to another column, with practice I’m getting more accurate. It’s less of an issue on the larger screen of the N8. Because of the layout, you only see the suit of the cards when you move those underneath it, and I think this is the only change I would make to the graphics and layout.
Given that touch-screens can sometimes lead to errors (say on a bumpy road) it would be good to have even a single level of undo for the times when there is a genuine mistake made. You can easily see one step ahead so it’s not as if this would be used to “cheat” at the game.
Freecell has always been a good choice for a computer game, and it makes even more sense on mobile, especially as touch is now easy to use with the new capacitive screens. It’s an even better choice as a casual mobile game, and even without the bells and whistles you’d expect, this is a lean but mean and playable version of the card game.
While there is a lot of quirkiness to this application, it continues to follow OffScreen’s mission to create simple and functional applications. Given that remit, there’s little to complain about, especially as it is a free application. Is it first on the list to download? Nope, it would struggle to make the first page. But it does play Freecell, it’s a nice casual game which is intuitive to play, and the more titles like this that appear in the Ovi Store, the healthier the whole Symbian app economy will be.
-- Ewan Spence, Dec 2010.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at