Previews

Hands on with Aquastax

It's the puzzle game that won't put you in a billy goat huff

Hands on with Aquastax
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| AquaStax

Y'know what the world of mobile games is missing?

Goats.

They're perfectly capable of eating washing, providing tasty cheese, leaping nimbly between mountain-ledges and serving as a convenient four-legged bearded cipher for the Devil. But can you play with them on your phone? No. It's a disgrace.

Thankfully, Infospace is steaming in to right this wrong with its upcoming Aquastax puzzle game.

Yes, it features goats, although Infospace's VP of European operations, John Chasey isn't saying for the moment just how they'll be used in the game. Thankfully, he has plenty to say about other aspects of the puzzler, which will be released this October.

"The quick way to describe it is as a cross between Lemmings and Tetris," he says. "You have these little Gumbler characters at the bottom of the screen, and an exit at the top. You have to build a tower for them to climb up and reach the exit."

Sounds simple enough, although there's one important complication. There's water rising all the time, which provides you with a strict time limit to play against – take too long, and the Gumblers drown.

The little fellas are genuinely appealing characters, like a cross between the lemmings in, er, Lemmings, and the Doozers in classic (in our heads at least) kids TV series Fraggle Rock.

Chasey explains that the Gumblers have their own artificial intelligence, governing how and when they climb your towers, which are constructed by rotating falling blocks, a la Tetris.

"The tower needs to be wide enough," says Chasey. "If it's one block wide, the Gumbler won't climb up it because it's too narrow for him. On early levels it's straightforward, but as you move up it gets more complicated."

The complications include more pointy-edged blocks that are harder for Gumblers to climb, explosive blocks that can be used to blow up other blocks, and slippy blocks that the Gumblers won't be able to get a grip on.

Oh, and seagulls, which will fly down, pick up your luckless Gumblers and fly away with them (whether or not they also crap on your nicely-laid towers is, as yet, unconfirmed). The game also has you fighting on multiple fronts as you progress.

"You start off with just one Gumbler, but on later levels multiple Gumblers are climbing up," says Chasey. "You might even have to build two towers, and as the water level is rising constantly, you can't just concentrate on one tower and then build the other one when you've finished it."

Infospace could be onto a winner with Aquastax. It has cleverly blended two well-known forms of gameplay to make something new, it's got appealing characters, and from our hands-on test at E3, it looks well-suited to the mobile screen. There'll be 50 levels to play, covering five separate themes.

Click "Track It!" to be kept up to date with progress on the game. And as soon as we find out more about those goats, you'll read it here first.

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)