Tatomic Lite
by Eric March on November 8, 2008 at 2:56 pm
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(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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App Name: Tatomic Lite
Developer: VGViews, Inc.
Category: Logic & Puzzle Games
Here’s a twist on the classic Dr. Mario brand of Tetris variants. Various coloured atoms fall from the sky, and you must manoever and rotate them into place so that they form contiguous chains of like-coloured atoms in order to eliminate them from the board.
Sounds pretty standard so far, but where the game tries to diverge a bit is that the number of atoms required to form a chain for any given colour varies from level to level. Along the side of the screen is a key that tells you how many atoms of a given colour are required to form a chain to eliminate them from the board, which both increases the challenge and encourages high scoring chains and combos.
The game is played in left-rotated landscape, and controlled via translucent soft-buttons overlaid on the game screen; the top buttons move left and right, while the lower-left drops, and the lower-right rotates. Oddly, it took a wee bit of getting used to, but it worked well once I got into the swing of things.
The graphics and animations here are pretty top-notch. Smooth, colourful, lots of lovely explosions when an elimination chain is formed. Sound is similarily excellent, and the music is some of the best ambient/chillout tunes I’ve heard - though they’re cut off mayby halfway through and loop poorly, which is kind of annoying. (Presumably this is to keep game size down, but frankly, if you’re going to write a game with awesome music, shouldn’t you just let it all hang out? Once you’ve committed yourself to crossing that 10 meg OTA download size then why bother limiting yourself?)
Music glitches aside, Tatomic is definitely a top notch game — but the $5 sticker price for the full version is bound to put some people off. I think that maybe it might be worth the price — if they fixed the music and maybe optimized and enhanced their sound routines to play more than one sample at a time so the muted explosions don’t sound so stilted when they go off in a chain reaction. This lite version will limit you to the first 10 levels of mode 1.
Despite the sticker price for the full version, I’m still going to have to give this 5 stars and some random pills I found in my medicine cabinet.
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