Jenga Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

When a South American butterfly flaps its wings, a Jenga block topples in the UK

As part of the recent revival of traditional games being brought to mobile, Iplay have brought the tower building phenomenon that is Jenga. The aim is to build as high a tower as possible by strategically extracting bricks from a prebuilt block and carefully positioning them on top. Jenga itself has had a slight boom in recent years thanks to jumbo garden sized pieces and is no longer restricted to winter time wasting moments.

Jenga may not be the most obvious of games that might work on the mobile but Iplay have done a valiant job. The graphics are the game's selling point and forces you to take this as a serious challenge. The 3D graphics of the block look really good and you can spin through each side as you plot your next move. Rather than highlighting bricks, you control a floating hand and can move it around the block until you find the brick you want.

There is great flexibility in the controls. You can choose to pull a brick out lengthways and you even have control over the exit angles. Bricks can be slid out by pushing one of the short ends all the way out (probably the safest but least satisfying). The game also lets you prod the brick before selecting it; this gives you a chance to see how the other bricks depend on your chosen brick for stability. Even when drawing a brick out, the whole lock will hake and it's down to your timing and precise extraction whether you are successful.

There is still only so much that you can legally do with a Jenga brick and the game comprises a series of challenges which force you to build evermore precarious structures. Challenges are invariably played against the computer who has a decent enough AI to make for an interesting game. The mobile version of Jenga has many benefits; you don't need to carry 50 or so bricks with you and there's no delay in setting up the initial Jenga construction. More importantly, Jenga Mobile introduces some new bricks to add a bit of variety to the proceedings. Bricks include the rough and the light and can be used (or left) to your advantage. It's a neat addition that increase the tactics and gives the game a bit more weight. Add some trophies/achievements to the mix and you have a well rounded package.