iPhone App: Mental Blocks

April 5th, 2009

= 2 stars

Mental Blocks is a puzzle game where you remove colored blocks from the screen as efficiently as possible.

The Good

• Simple rules allow immediately game play: touch a colored block and all neighboring blocks of the same color become selected. Tap a second time to remove the selected blocks. After the blocks vanish, remaining ones fall to fill in empty space.
• Special blocks allow blocks to be eliminated in varying ways, like all blocks of one color even if they aren’t touching, or removing an whole row of blocks regardless of their color.

The Bad

• Big opportunity missed with the iPhone’s tilt detection– ideally, remaining blocks would fall according to the iPhone’s orientation (as with Trism).
• Doesn’t seem to be much strategy, beyond touching the area with the most adjacent colored squares, and considering the resulting block arrangement from each move. Some sort of timed element like self-moving blocks or randomly disappearing ones would spice things up.

Conclusion

Mental Blocks is an amusing diversion, but needs something more to make it a highly recommended iPhone game.

iTunes App Store Link: Mental Blocks

(This review requested by developer)