Review: Sphyro 3D
Score:
74%
This is a cute little strategy game, the object of which is to be the last player to place one of your marbles on the game board. Throw in some whizzy 3D graphics that make perfect sense in regard to the game, a smart computer A.I., along with the ability to make some nifty strategy choices, and you have a mobile game that appears to tick all the boxes.
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As the game starts, you are presented with a 4x4 grid of depressions, into these you and your opponent take turns to place your coloured marbles. Once a number of marbles are in place, you can stack upwards as well, in the pyramid shape promised by the game icon. You don’t have to play a new marble onto the game grid, you can “lift” a marble up from a lower level if you can stack it higher up.
Given the nature of the game is to play the last marble, this saves you one of them, but you need to work, strategy-wise, to allow this to happen.
The other “move” of note is if you can create a 2x2 square of your own marbles. This allows you to remove two of your marbles back off the game grid (as long as they don’t have any marbles resting above them). That naturally puts you in a very strong situation, resource wise, with your stock of marbles – you start with fifteen – but it clears a lot of space on the board that can easily be exploited by a smart opponent.
And you’ve a wide range of choices for your opponent. Naturally you can play against a human opponent, using your Symbian smartphone as nothing more than a very swish game board. If you’ve a burning desire to keep this challenge up while travelling you can play over the internet. You’ll need to set up an account, which is quick and painless (although you have to use the on-screen keyboard, so no luck if you’ve got an E7). You can either input the name of someone you want to play, or just challenge the first person that comes along.
You’ve also got two levels of computer A.I. to challenge you – the basic level is a good challenge but doesn’t plan that far ahead so it shouldn’t take too long to work out some good strategies – which then will need a lot of work when you move to the second and harder skill level.
Finally, the graphics. There’s a lot to take in with all these stacked marbles, especially later in the game when they are two or three levels deep, so Sphyro allows you to change your viewpoint of the game grid. And it’s as simple as dragging your finger around the screen – left and right to spin the board, up and down to change the tilt, and the pinch action to zoom. All very intuitive and simple, yet it reduces the potential barriers a game like this could have.
I like Sphyro. It has a lot of depth, even though it can be quite quick to play, it looks and reacts wonderfully fast, and the board feels real, which in a modern app-focused world is a prerequisite to doing well. It’s not to everyone’s tastes, but any puzzle/board game fans out there should check this out.
-- Ewan Spence, March 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at