Review: Pipe Mania
Score:
40%
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Look, this is going to be painful, maybe you should just stop reading now. You see, last week there was a bit of a scuffle in the AAS chat room, because Pipe Mania had shown up in the Ovi Store and we all wanted to review it. I got the short straw (I just didn't realise it at the time). Put together by AppsOnGo, this doesn’t appear to be a licenced version of the game, and while it does have the same starting point as the traditional PipeMania, it rapidly goes horribly wrong.
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
So, the game loads up, and you progress to your first time playing it. As it should be, so far so good, although there are a lot of primary colours in the menu system. You’ve got as long as you like to look at the order of the first few pieces before you hit the “play” button, which feels a bit of a cheat. Then there’s another wait as the water flows into the starting pipe, and away it flows, with you tapping on the screen to place a new piece of pipe, with the handy knowledge of what’s coming next along the bottom of the screen.
Then I find Dante’s Inferno has a level put aside for bad PipeMania clones to thrive, and I’m playing in it.
Want to speed up the flow of the water now a level is finished? There’s a fast forward button as well (what is this, an MP3 player?) which I would expect to push the water through as fast as possible. Nope, it just lights up at some point with little rhyme or reason. And then, as I’m placing pieces, suddenly I can’t place any more pieces. Tapping on an empty square does nothing, nor does trying to replace a piece. Turns out that the code looks at how long your pipe is, and if it’s passed the goal of that level, it’ll stop you placing any more pieces on to the game board.
Want to build, can't build.
Oh come on! Part of the fun of PipeMania is the intricate patterns, going for seven crossover pieces used in one flow, and making the sort of designs that would put a Celtic wedding band to shame. And you’re denying me that? Where’s the art to go with the skill? Oh wait.
That’s right, you’ve taken the skill away as well. One of the fundamentals of PipeMania is that when you place a pipe down, it should really stay there. If you want to replace it, there should be a penalty, be it a reduction in your score, or the time it takes to clear away the old pipe before laying the new one.
Here there’s no score to remove points from, but more importantly, there’s no delay! You just tap an old pipe and boom, instantly the new pipe is there. Which means that if you want a vertical piece of pipe, you can just “taptaptaptaptap-oh there it is”. With no penalty whatsoever.
That’s. Just. Wrong.
I've also a sneaky feeling that the pipe pieces are being chosen at random. Which makes for varied gameplay, but frankly creating shortages of certain pieces to go with the terrain and obstacles on the game grid is another facet of PipeMania that has been erased from the memory of AppsOnGo.
I could keep on going, but this is just disappointing all round. It’s trading on the name of a classic game, and doing it little more than lip service. It feels wrong, it plays badly, it doesn’t appreciate what made PipeMania the sort of game that we would argue about reviewing (in a good way) at All About Symbian.
Steve, Rafe, David, you’re welcome to this, I’m done here.
-- Ewan Spence, April 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at