Alpha3D Photo Puzzle Platinum (Updated: FAIL)

by Eric March on October 13, 2008 at 10:56 pm

(1 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)

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App Name: Alpha3D Photo Puzzle Platinum
Developer: Impact Financials, Inc.
Category: Games: Logic & Puzzle

At first sight, this looked like an interesting twist on the old jigsaw puzzle genre.  Alpha3D Photo Puzzle Does the usual jigsaw puzzle, though without the indents and tabs around the edges, opting instead for perfectly square pieces, and shoves them forcibly in to 3D.  Start by choosing easy, medium or hard, which determines the number of pieces the puzzle will be broken into.  Then, it’s time to solve — and that’s where it gets weird.

First of all you are given a time limit within which you must solve the puzzle.  Not so bad, right?  Except that while you play, the puzzle is gently lurching to and fro, listing side to side, and overall behaving like a balloon in the breeze, so while you’ve got a piece picked up, the puzzle is actively trying to avoid you.

Speaking of picking up pieces, that part works well enough — except that when you slide it around the puzzle to pick a place to put it, all of the pieces you’re sliding it over get knocked unceremoniously out of place.  So displaced, the airborne pieces will fly out toward you in a generally haphazard manner before eventually settling back in place — in different locations than the ones they were displaced from.  If you had your eye on a few pieces and a good idea of where to put them, you’ll have to hunt for them all over again if you knocked them out of place while moving your previous piece.  Besides being annoying and wasting your time hunting for those pieces again, you have to wait for the pieces to settle down before you can pick them up again, which only further wastes your time.  I wouldn’t care if they were quick about it, but the damn things float lazily in the virtual air for 4 FULL SECONDS before coming down to rest.  Yes, I timed it.

And then there are the pieces themselves.  The 3D blocks the image pieces are pasted on are bevelled, but the image pieces only occupy the flat areas of the blocks, so there’s a gap between the image pieces that make lining up pieces difficult, especially with complex imagery, where it would be damnably hard to tell if this piece belongs below that piece because there may not be enough differentiation between the pieces to tell without being able to line up the pieces edge-on.  And you can’t, because there’s a freakin’ gap.

Pieces do settle down permanently and get rid of the gap when they are put in their proper place, so you can’t knock those out of alignment, which is good, but it’s small comfort.

Finally, because you’ve spent so much time chasing blocks that keep moving around the board and waiting for displaced blocks to settle the hell down, your timer has run down to 15 seconds.  Suddenly, all of the pieces start shimmying and shaking, swaying and twisting and generally acting like a hyperactive child in desperate need of ritalin. (See the screenshot)  If you thought solving the puzzle was hard before, now try it, smart ass.  It’ll be like trying to put a diced Jell-O bundt mould back together.  While it’s lodged in a running paint shaker.

Look, I kinda like the idea of a 2D jigsaw puzzle played in 3D.  It’s gimmicky, sure, but it can breathe a bit of new life into an old genre. This however is totally and completely the wrong way to implement it.  It looks like it could be fun, but it’s almost as if Impact Financials tried to think of every possible way in which a simple jigsaw puzzle game could be made to deliberately piss you off.  If the board stayed put and maybe angled towards the picked up piece as you tap and drag it around into place, if there were no gaps between the bits of image, if the pieces didn’t fly all over the place when you moved a piece from one place to the other, and if it didn’t go all spastic when your timer was running out, then maybe we’d have something.  But right now, the way it works: No.  Just … no.

Also … Impact Financials?  This must be a business company trying to break into the profitable games market.  One who themselves just aren’t gamers and designed this monstrosity by committee.

Note that this is the full version, and while both this version and the lite version are available on the App Store, this full version is available free for a limited time.  There’s no indication when this will turn pay or how much it will be, so if you want it — and you’re totally into hair-pulling frustration — grab it while you can.  If, by the time you read this, it is no longer free, then you can grab the Lite verison instead.

UPDATE 10/21/08: They’re charging a buck for the lite version.  For the visually impaired, or those that missed it: THEY ARE CHARGING A BUCK FOR THE LITE VERSION.

Congratulations, Impact Financials.  You’ve earned this.

That’s right.  The first ever double fail.  One for CHARGING A BUCK FOR THE LITE VERSION, and the second for being the first app I’ve ever downgraded.

I can’t change my 2-star rating (there are some things even admins can’t do), so just pretend the second one is a pity vote.

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Posted in Games: Arcade, Games: Logic & Puzzle, Hall of FAIL