polyhedra (iPhone) Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

It's been a while since we've seen such an innovative game for the iPhone

Polyhedra makes the most of the iPhone's attributes and beautifully shows of the appeal of the iPhone.

The game has a pretty basic concept; you have to press and hold anywhere on the screen to create a shape. The longer you hold your finger down, the larger the shape becomes. The aim is to fill 66% of the screen with your shapes. You won’t be able to complete it with just one shape and you are allowed to create up to 10-15 shapes per level. To make things tricky, the game has plenty of enemy shapes bouncing around. If your shape touches these while it is still expanding then you lose it and you have to start the shape building from scratch. The game is bit like an inverse version of Qix where you have to judge the balance between bravery and foolhardiness when trying to fill the screen. Pressing and holding to expand the shapes works well on the whole. It can be tricky trying to fill small gaps but that could be down to fat fingers and the lack of a stylus.

To make things more interesting and more iDevice specific, you can rotate the device and let gravity drop your shapes around the screen. Switching between landscape and portrait or even flipping it upside down is a handy way to trap some of the enemies beneath them. This will give you a little more breathing space to fill up the space above.

Polyhedron is played across 5 worlds and toybox/practice level. Each world has its own shape to generate. The game starts off with circles and you need to get past level 9 before the next world is unlocked. After level 9, it’s all about the points and then the game starts to get a bit harder. Later levels will be filled with enemies and the gravity will be disabled so the shapes will be stuck in place.

This is a pre-release build and the only major bug is that it doesn’t save your score if you decide to quit once you’ve passed level 9. The next world is still unlocked so we’re not crying too much.

The overall game design and package is very smooth and slick. The menus work well with minimal loading times and has a lot of features you would expect from a top publisher including listening to your own iTunes library. Unlocking all the worlds is fairly straight forward but the AGON online scores should keep you occupied.