Remember that game Labyrinth where you had to move a marble through a maze, and you could tilt the board four ways to avoid the holes? This new game is kind of like Labyrinth, only less fun and more irritating. Find out what game has me spinning around in frustration.

Freeze! is about an eye that has to escape various prison cells. You can rotate the prison so that the eye can fall naturally, and some levels give you a freeze button so you can stop the eye and rotate the board around him. This is a pretty convoluted way to make a physics based puzzle game, but I tried to give it a chance.

Some of the boards are fun. You can see the path you need to take and where you need to change direction to avoid spikes. The most interesting levels have gravity based obstacles, so you actually have to move the board upside down and then right side up again, to move the eye through. Sometimes you get 99 freezes which is basically unlimited freezing, but sometimes you only get one or two freezes that have to be used sparingly. Some levels don’t use freeze at all and it’s just a rotating puzzle, in which case why did you make a game about freezing?

Freeze!
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Most of the boards are annoying. I don’t mean they’re really challenging, I mean they’re constructed to work against you, so screw that. Especially in the levels without the freeze button, you just have to tilt and tilt the board ever so slightly, then tilt back so you don’t roll into spikes. I get it, that’s hand-eye coordination, but when you’re changing the rules from level to level, I’m not going to keep trying to learn how to play. On other levels, it’s easy to see when you have to freeze and unfreeze, but it just becomes tedious going through the motions.

The controls are pretty intuitive. You drag the board clockwise or counterclockwise with your finger. I’m surprised they didn’t make tilt controls so you actually turned your entire device to rotate the prison. It wouldn’t have made Freeze! any more fun but it seems a logical way to control the game.

Freeze!
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The graphics are good. The black and white backgrounds are beautiful and the foreground components are exquisitely simple. It’s pretty much a set of black lines but they convey exactly where the dangers are. The music is more of a techno-synth that’s really not appealing to me, but you can totally play the game silent.

Freeze! is only a dollar but that only includes world one. That's 25 levels, but still you have to pay for world two, and worlds three and four are still in the works. I know it’s only a dollar for world two, but it doesn’t sit well with me. I’d rather pay five dollars for a game with all the levels in it than a dollar at a time. You can unlock a few bonus levels, so thanks for small rewards.

I respect the physics and construction of Freeze! but the whole is not as great as the sum of its parts. Freeze! is just a boring game. You’ll work at its more challenging levels, only to have to slog through more deathtraps, and then get a bill for future levels. I wanted to warm up to Freeze!, but the experience left me feeling cold.

 

App Store Link: Freeze! for iPhone and iPad | By Andreas von Lepel | Price: $0.99  | Version: 1.1 | 28.1 MB | Rating 9+4.5 out of 10 arcade sushi rating

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