Review: Burn the Rope
Score:
84%
Now here's something that feels fresh and exciting. Burn the Rope has a simple premise, you need to burn all the rope. Almost everything you need to know is in the title of the game. The only other thing you need to know is that this game is one of the few that really makes good use of the tilt sensors on your Symbian smartphone.
Version Reviewed: 1.00
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Presented with a complicated shape made out of rope, you can tap the screen to start the burning. You can only do this once though, so you need to think carefully about where you tap to start the pyromania. Because as we all know, fire only travels upwards. How to help it on its way? Spin your phone around so the flame can travel in an upwards direction. Even if it's just a little bit of an upwards angle, the flame will stay lit, and carry on its journey, consuming the rope and bringing you closer to the goal of burning up 100% of the fuel on each level.
So you can regulate the speed of the flame, giving you some thinking time. This is important because the flame cannot backtrack to take out another piece of rope - because there is no rope to travel up. Your first challenge then is to work out which route the flame will need to travel so you can reach every bit of rope. It's like one of those "can you draw the shape with one line" puzzles that used to keep you amused at school.
One trick that the paper and pen puzzles didn't have is that when the flame comes to a join in the rope, both sections will burn. That gives you two flames to manage. In some cases you'll have to sacrifice one of the flames once a tricky single piece of rope is burned through, other times both flames need to be nurtured along a complicated path, making sure that both stay lit and travelling upwards to get you in a position to burn the ants and complete your....
Oh, did I not mention the ants?
Later levels see the rope being home to many colours of ants - you'll need to burn them, as they count in the percentage of "things that can burn" on a level. But there's a twist. When you burn an ant, the flame becomes that colour. So a red ant gives you a red flame, purple gives you a purple flame. For one level it's a pretty effect. The next level, you'll see a splash of red rope. That can only be burned by a red flame.
So now you need to plan a route that burns an ant to get the right colour, get that flame to the rope, and carry on. The ants run around by the way, so you'll need to chase them as well. Keep up at the back!
It gets manic pretty quickly, think of the first five or six levels as a tutorial to the game before you get the real deal. It's complicated, although just about possible; the control system is unique and provides a very fine grain of control and it feels both different and classic at the same time. There's a lot in the positive column for Burn the Rope, and very little on the negative side. I'm going to enjoy playing this one for a long time.
-- Ewan Spence, June 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at