Developer: DocotorEntertainment
Steam Release: June 2010
Hours Played: 2.7
Similar To: Art of Gravity / Hamilton's Great Adventure / Lineway / Lyne / Unium / Yankai's Peak
Rating: 2/5 Parsnips
Problem solving comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes but usually falls into three general categories: (1) breezy and fun; (2) challenging and rewarding, and (3) mind bogglingly baffling that's too difficult to work out or requires so much brain-power that you just can't be arsed. Welcome to Puzzle Dimension. You control a golden ball which jumps or moves one square at a time in four different directions. A number of flowers are dotted around which you collect by moving over them. Then you navigate your way to the golden exit gate to end the level. At first, squares can be solid or crumble away when you move off. Later you get a different varieties ranging from those made of ice, which you slide over, those with mechanical springs, those with grills that have lava underneath after you move off, and those that form switches to activate mechanisms. Falling off the edge immediately ends the level.
Gameplay is enhanced further when levels are introduced that require the ball to travel on the underside of the starting surface. To facilitate this process and to let you work out your next move, the game allows you to zoom out and to rotate the camera 360 degrees in any direction. This spinning of the camera to wherever you want works extremely well and really does give the game a refreshing twist. There is a blue bar that decreases as you play which has some bearing on your score but good luck with working out how the hell that works! Just working out how to complete the level is reward enough. The downside to the game is that the difficulty level is bumped up far too sharply early on with the baffle-factor rising high after about 20 levels or just a few hours of play.
This game will not be winning any awards in the sound department. The pedestrian electronic tunes in the background are bland and uninspiring while graphics, particularly when it comes to menus, are also on the cheap looking side. The main game looks as if it were built out of lego pieces but this is not a criticism. It comes packaged with a very good tutorial, a Progress screen which shows your achievements, a Help screen which shows the controls and Settings which give you the basic adjustments. Play takes you to a very boring screen of 10 unlockable clusters (represented by equally boring symbols) that display 10 levels represented by a circle. (Some areas may contain more or less - I haven't got to later parts.) The game plays best with a controller but if you are using mouse + keyboard you can only use the keys to navigate through the menus.
The game is divided into clusters which contain 10 levels each. With each cluster, a new gameplay mechanic is introduced. After you complete about 7 or 8 levels of a cluster, the next batch becomes unlocked and available for you to try. When you complete a level, a little circle under the name of the cluster lights up to indicate that you have completed it. There is a score system which has you earning a bronze, silver and gold achievement that can be viewed in the Progress option in the start menu. The system as a whole is satisfactory but the presentation is quite bland and doesn't really blend with the rest of the game perhaps suggesting that the developers didn't put as much effort into this area of the game.
CONCLUSION
When first firing up Puzzle Dimension the game is a breeze and a lot of fun. Zooming out and spinning that camera around is a cool novelty and the game seems to have lots of promise. Then, too soon, something happens not unlike that moment in maths class when you begin to realise that you've hit your limit and it all becomes a struggle. The sense of achievement, curiosity and wonder you once had now gets replaced by a long slog and the feeling it's all a bit of a chore. A puzzle game should be fun for as long as possible so why not extend that sweet-spot for a further 3 or 4 clusters and have that learning curve rise gradually rather than spiking it up so harshly so soon? I give full credit to the developers for making the game such a fun experience for the first few hours - but puzzles should never be turned into a long hard slog.
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