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• Price: $2.99 (Get It)
• Version: 1.0
• Developer: Terminal Core Games

BloXoR is a new kind of puzzle game that has you tilting your iPhone/iPod Touch to get the OXO blocks to line up exactly in that order, whether horizontal or vertical. It requires solid hand-eye coordination on your part, as it combines Labyrinth with a puzzle element on a 7×11 grid. As you tilt the device, every block on the board moves, so you have to use your surroundings and other puzzle pieces to help you complete each level.

As you start each level, of which there are 72 in total, you’ll be provided instructions necessary to advance past that level to the next. It’s easy to pick up the game and play; the learning curve is just right. However, the later stages can be very difficult, and depending on your mood, can either be delightfully frustrating or angrily frustrating. There are special “blox” to help you; there’s the bomb blox which blows up weak walls, the bridge blox which makes a bridge in any hole it falls in. There are junk blox which just gets in your way and challenges you to get around them, or you can get rid of them by letting them fall in holes. Holes also provide an additional hazard. If any essential blox falls in there, you have to start over. There will be levels will you’ll be doing this a lot.

The options provided are the ability to turn on and off sound, reset high score, and to select a level provided you already played it before. The score board tracks your total score overall, your score for each level, number of levels available to play, number of levels needing to be unlocked, total time played, and total amount of times you’ve played the game. There’s also an instruction page going over the basics of BloXoR.

Unfortunately, if you play a level again to beat your previous score, there’s no way of knowing if you beat your score or not unless you memorized beforehand the original score. This makes it nearly pointless to have individual level scores. A congratulatory message when beating a previous score would help.The developer corrected me, when you do beat a previous score, the text is dull blue, instead of the usual bright white. Definitely a better way should be made to make it clear that a previous score has been beaten.

Before each level starts, you have to align the device flat and hold it over a dot to get the level to start. This is a way to orient you before a level starts. You tilt the device up and down, left and right to move the pieces on the board. The control feels just right, not too sensitive but not too slow either. It does take a bit to get accustomed to working with squares, instead of a round ball like you would in Labyrinth.

The visuals are nice and polished, each blox are distinctive in appearance, and everything works well together. The animation is smooth as the pieces move around the board.

The sound is minimal, only taking place right when you complete a level and the 3 blox, OXO are aligned. That’s it. There’s no music, although the game encourages you to use your own music library while playing. If you are playing your own music library when starting the game, it will not fade it off.

BloXoR is an original puzzle game that is definitely challenging as you get further in the game. Some levels can just be boring, or just too difficult. The puzzle gamer that really enjoys a challenge will certainly enjoy BloXoR, especially considering it has 72 levels.

Tags: bloxor, labyrinth, terminal core games