Push Button B

Game: Blackout!
Purchased from: The iTunes Store
Price paid: $0.99
Platform: iPhone, iPad, & iPod Touch

It seems to me that the iDevices are fairly well suited to puzzle games you can just pick up and play for a few minutes at a time, so I like to pick up a few of the cheapies… also, it turns out that I like to try lots of cheapie games.

Blackout!, exclamation point and all, is a game where you have to match colors (*gasp!*)… sort of. You have a series of grids full of gems, ‘starter’ pieces, and a light source. You have to use your wits (and your finger!) to clear gems away and create paths through the dirt so that the light flows through your tunnels to the unlit lights. You do this by rubbing your finger over the gems you want to get rid of, and by using two fingers to scroll the screen around. Pretty straightforward stuff.

But I ran into one big problem with this game: I don’t have a transparent hand. As you can probably tell from the video above, when you’re dragging your hand across your iThingus, trying to make your clears, your hand gets in the way, making it kind of difficult to string together anything longer than about four pieces. This also comes into play when you’re trying to scroll the screen around looking for clears. It’s kind of tough to see through your hands to the game board.

Other than that, the game’s pretty unremarkable. It tries to be clever by adding more colors or unclearable stuff that you have to work around. Pretty standard stuff. I’d probably get more play out of the thing if I could somehow make a clear hand to play with, but as it is, it’s not too awful.