Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Daily Flash: Magnet Towers

Sometimes, after a long day, we need something mindless with flashy sounds and lots of points to pick us up. Magnet Towers has a simple concept, roll your mouse over the similarly colored tokens, and avoid tokens of other colors. A fun game, but one fatal flaw puts a huge dent in it's entertainment value.

Presentation:
Two large problems stand out for me with the presentation. The first, and it's mostly just a personal preference, is that the music is a generic techno mix and is ridiculously loud. The second, and here's the big crutch that is holding the game back, is that the colors are too similar. This is a game where quickly distinguishing between colors is important, letting you figure out which tokens are safe to touch, and which aren't. Unfortunately, neon green and neon yellow are just so close together, that it takes a lot of focus to tell them apart. A color-blind option would be nice, or changing one of the colors to pink would work just as well.
2/5

Gameplay:
Don't get me wrong, the game is plenty fun by itself, but it just suffers from the poor color decisions. There's satisfaction in whisking around the level, narrowly avoiding tokens you don't want. But, once again, there are problems that could be easily fixed. There's a problem with the interface hiding tokens in the bottom left and bottom right corners. Several times, I finished off a stack thinking I got every piece just to discover that I missed one sitting perfectly under the Mute button. Increasing the number of colors in later levels would also be nice, instead of only raising the number of tokens on the screen.
3/5

Overall:
DO play this game. Just turn the game on mute, and stick around for a minute or two. It's a prime example of how a game could be so much more, but got lost somewhere in the polish stage. I wish there was more to get out of this game, but as it is, the game is just a shadow of what it could be.
2.5/5

Play Magnet Towers Here!

1 comment:

  1. Well I just started playing it a few minutes ago and that was a lot shorter than I'd expected, lol. Again, can't agree more with everything you've said. I remedied the music issue with putting my own cool (if I say so myself :P) music in the background, as I usually do. Had no problems with the colors at the beginning, but when it started getting more crowded, it did get annoying. I messed up a couple times just from confusing the green and blue magnets.

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