Red and yellow make orange. Blue and yellow make green. Red and blue make purple.
Fusing different shades might give you flashbacks to your schooldays but in Mixt such visual alchemy is required to clear the screen of magically suspended blobs of paint. Committing yourself to chromatic study is a must if you're to have any chance of scoring big in this frantic puzzle game.
Orbs descend from the top of the screen and must be dragged towards the corresponding colour pool at the bottom of the display. This part of the game is as simple as it gets: red blobs go into the red pool, green into the green pool, and so on.
The ultimate aim of each level is to fill up a predetermined number of pools. Each successful sink reduces some of the pool’s fill meter. However, sinking the wrong colour has a negative effect on your life gauge. Should this drop to zero, it’s Game Over.
The pools have a habit of changing colour, however, and you’re often left with an assortment of blobs that can’t be comfortably deposited. This is where mixing comes into play. You might have a red and yellow blob, but an orange pool at the bottom. Fuse the two blobs together and bingo, you’re set.
As you fuse more and more blobs the end result is a larger ball of paint. Link too many and it will become dangerously unstable and prone to popping, but if you manage to sink it into the appropriate pool before it does so, you’ll earn a massive points bonus.
Sometimes globules of colour need to be separated into their base colours. A sloppy colour combination can result in a rather off-putting ball of brown, for instance, which can't be placed in one of the pools. By drawing a line through the offending blob, you can reduce it to its core elements and start your mixing afresh.
The touch controls make fusing together the various blobs enjoyable and there’s a tangible sense of achievement when your skills rise to the level where you can quickly join and separate your available paint balls to conquer a tricky stage.
Mixt does succumb to repetition after prolonged play, though more worrying an issue is stability. Several times the game stubbornly refused to start, claiming that not enough memory was available and device reset was required.
These shortcomings cast Mixt in grayscale, even though its core gameplay carries enough of a vibrant tone to earn a basic recommendation.
Mixt
Mixt offers a fusion of colour, control, and challenging play that could stand to mix things up to avoid repetition and unseemly technical issues
Damien McFerran
Damien's mum hoped he would grow out of playing silly video games and gain respectable employment. Perhaps become a teacher or a scientist, that kind of thing. Needless to say she now weeps openly whenever anyone asks how her son's getting on these days.