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Review: MicroMaze
Published by Ewan Spence at 11:56 UTC, November 17th 2009
It's another marble rolling game! Yaay! And while you can't tell from the text, let me point out that I say this with a total lack of irony. Unlike other genres, having yet another marble game to play, now that I've completed the others that I have on my phone, it's time to carry on with the latest and best.
In this case, it's MicroMaze from one of Steve's favourite developers, Botond FM in Hungary, who's already got a strong casual games portfolio, including MicroPool and MicroPinball. From that you can probably work out that lead developer Gabor Fetter has a strong understanding of the physics of rolling balls around a computer environment – which is the perfect place to start for a marble rolling game.
Let's be honest here, some marble games can be a bit woolly in their handling and not feel like a real simulation. That's not the case here, MicroMaze is one of the smoothest implementations of the genre I've ever seen on Symbian OS. I'm running it on the Nokia 5800, so while earlier versions could leverage the extra graphical horsepower of the N95, here there needs to be a bit more finesse.
The goal, as in all these games, is to tilt the table that a marble rolls around to guide the marble to a finish line, which in MicroMaze is a specified target hole. If you fall down any other hole, then it's level over and you have to start (the level) all over again. It's frustrating if you've taken a long time to pick through a difficult level, but there's always a certain level of self-flagellation in these games – the only thing that can kill you is yourself. Don't rationalise it that you sneezed, you had an itch, your neighbours cat jumped on your lap, a loud noise caused you to look away... if you got it wrong then you got it wrong.
All the levels are possible, and thanks to getting all the mazes on a single screen you can always see where you need to go. It's just getting there that's the problem. With 81 levels to go through, you're not going to finish this in a hurry. As you progress through the levels you'll spot that their design is very sneaky. You'll start to come across different surfaces, like the slippy marble or crunchy snow, all of which change the characteristics of your marble's behaviour.
Six different surfaces (worlds in the language of the game) aren't all. Sometimes it's not a hole you have to avoid, but a massive valley that's spanned by a tiny bridge – with no guard rail. Or you have to navigate over trapdoor holes which open and close. Get the timing wrong and it's as fatal as a drop in the gallows. Great game mechanics and all nicely brought in to ramp up the difficulty as you continue to play. A right-of-screen timer adds a slight sense of urgency, but as long as you're not getting things horribly wrong then time shouldn't be an issue.
It's clear that Fetter knows how to program a game so that it keeps on rewarding the player. There's no feeling of grinding through the numbers, it just stays fresh right until the end. Like most marble games though, it's tough to feel any replay value (beyond passing it to the kids in the back seat of a car journey... which is just evil). There are also enough levels in here to make it great value for money. Definitely recommended.
-- Ewan Spence, Nov 2009.
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Review Discussion
It's another question how careful Gabor was when determining the price of this application. It's something that only time will tell him. However, if it turns out that he had overestimated it, then Freemium can still help: sell the core app free of charge with a minimum amount of levels so that people can become addict to the game: then charge for the remaining ~75-78 levels.
