Game Reviews

PathPix

Star onStar onStar onStar halfStar off
|
| PathPix
Get
PathPix
|
| PathPix

About four years ago, there was a month when I didn't watch television. It might have been on in the room and I might have been listening to Jack Bauer stop terrorists from using helium balloons to steal the Whitehouse, but I wasn't actually looking.

Instead, my gaze was fixed firmly on Picross DS: a logic puzzle game so ridiculously compulsive that it should have come with its own anonymous recovery group.

PathPix for Android, based on the hit iOS series, is a straightforward rehash of Nintendo's mash-up of Slitherlink and painting by numbers.

It plays impeccably without a stylus, too, although the neon-tinged looks lack the pixel-art charm of the Nintendo original.

Can you tell what it is yet?

We might have grown overly snobbish about things like HD menu screens in this technophile age, but PathPix's jarring jump from icon to a basic list of levels hardly suggests polish.

Still, the proof is in the puzzles, and there are just under 170 to sink your smartest synapses into, ranging from two-minute challenges that ease you into the mechanics to the monstrously sized final stages that could take a solid half hour to complete.

Each challenge uses exactly the same mechanics: you're presented with a grid that's filled with lots of colour-coded numbers. It's your job to link matching numbers together by both colour and the number of grid squares separating them.

This is achieved using simple swipe controls to draw lines between numbers, making sure to not block off later links or leave empty spaces.

It's simple enough to link twos and threes, but once you start dealing with anything higher than an eight (there are double-figured matches in the final levels), finding the exact route requires real concentration and certain amount of trial and error.

The payoff is well worth it - each link you make builds a picture that's only revealed when the puzzle is solved, along with a thought provoking famous quote on a related topic.

Time attack

While there's no denying the generosity of the content in PathPix, a lot of the patented Nintendo character has been lost in this incarnation.

Moreover, the lack of a timer or penalty for making bad moves reduces the challenge to simply having enough time and patience to make the countless links in the later levels.

It's undoubtedly compulsive and soothingly soporific to play, but there's too little originality in the design to make it more than a quality copycat.

PathPix

A decent Picross-alike that's crammed with solid logic puzzling, but lacking in originality and variety over the long haul
Score
Paul Devlin
Paul Devlin
A newspaper reporter turned games journo, Paul's first ever console was an original white Game Boy (still in working order, albeit with a yellowing tinge and 30 second battery life). Now he writes about Android with a style positively dripping in Honeycomb, stuffed with Gingerbread and coated with Froyo