Gamer reviews for Shades: A Simple Puzzle Game
Color Me Happy With Shades: A Simple Puzzle Game
Welcome to the vibrant world of Shades: A Simple Puzzle game brought to you by the evil geniuses at Unovo Apps. The game is conceptually a stacking puzzle game swirled together with that time you forgot to do your art project until 10 minutes before it was due. It is equal parts stacking and adrenaline.
The game is only available for Apple’s App Store right now and will set you back $1.99, unless you picked it up last week when it was featured as Apple’s “App of the Week.” There are no terrible pop-up ads to contend with and you don’t have to sell your firstborn child for magic gems if you want to play until your eyes go numb. This lovely distraction will require iOS 7 to download, but at 30 MB, it won’t take up too much room.
Game play is centered on organizing four identically shaded blocks into a line. The catch here is when two of the same colored blocks are stacked on top of each other, they mutate into one block a shade darker than when they began. The darkest of the four dropped colors will combine with another of that color to make one even darker and that darkest color will never be a drop. It seems easy enough, but the developers made sure not one player would be lulled to sleep by the game’s gradually darkening hues- they made a game that gets really challenging, very quickly.
The game has online leader boards, a choose-your-own-color option from palettes of yellows, blues, reds, purples and greens, and three difficulty settings: Easy, Medium and “I want to be angry all day” Hard. Since its release in September of last year, Shades has been updated four times- two of those updates even included player-requested changes which is super cool.
The game has the potential to be an excellent time-waster, as every time I played it, I improved my score enough to want to try again and again, which I did… until my phone battery died and I had to stop. The music is pleasant and definitely hum-able. My biggest issue with the game has to be the controls. The game allows you to either swipe the piece into position or tap the column and let the block fall. I had a steep learning curve with this one because I would tap as the piece was falling and the block would move columns as my finger pulled away.
Overall, Shades: A Simple Puzzle Game is like being trapped inside an angry kaleidoscope: it is hypnotic, colorful and you might have to call off of work until it lets you escape.