It's been sitting on my phone while I was researching the “Top Games” piece we posted this week, but now it's time to take a little bit more of an in-depth look at Gears, the cog-based puzzle game from MDragon, available in the Ovi Store.
I know that everyone loves to write the cliché of the pick up and play game that everybody should take for a spin, but Gears really takes that not as a tired way to close out a review, but as a rallying call for the sort of game that at least deserves a chance to be on every touch-enabled Symbian handset, because this is a lovely concept for a puzzle game.
Each screen starts out with some coloured cogs that are fixed in place. The yellow cog is spinning, while the blue cogs (there may be more than one) are not. Your job, with the aid of some spare cogs that are lying in the rack at the bottom of the screen, is to create a gearing system to start all the blue cogs spinning. Manage that, and it's on to the next level.
Complicating matters is that you have a limited number of cogs and a pesky little thing called gravity pulling down your cog to the bottom of the screen. It's not just a matter of picking up a cog from the box, dragging it where you want to play it, and letting it go, it must be able to stay there and not fall, Tetris block like, to the bottom of the screen. There are some nice levels where you have to use the cogs almost as scaffolding to balance two cogs in place so they hold each other up in an arch before using the scaffolding to reach up above the arch to the blue winning cog.
The final gotcha is the red forbidden zone. You can't move the centre of a cog into any red zone which is conveniently hanging around between the start and finish cogs. It's not the end of the world though; remember how much you hated gravity before? Well, now it's your best friend as you can drop cogs from above the red zone, just like the aforementioned Tetris, so that they meet up with another cog and mesh together inside the red zone.
Gears is a great little puzzler, a sort of mix between Tetris and a jigsaw puzzle. I do have some concerns, one in gameplay and one in longevity. You do need to get the cogs lined up in some levels to an almost pixel perfect level, and this can be frustrating when you can see it works but need to shift one tiny nudge to the left – which then takes about five or six attempts. Thankfully, there's no time limit on the levels.
The second concern is that Gears gets very monotonous after you've played a few levels. Unlike some puzzle games, you can't play this for hours on end – you hit the boredom level quite quickly. This has the benefit of making the 50 intricate levels last a lot longer in the real world, but does dull the game down.
This is a great distraction game, good for the moments when you want to do something, and it does deliver a little emotional kick whenever you work out the key to solving a level. I'd love to see more in this for a later update, perhaps adding in chains between the cogs and other physical objects to interact with. This is a good game, but there's the promise of so much more if it continues to be developed. Right now though, I'd still recommend it with a frustrated smile!
-- Ewan Spence, June 2010.