Enigmo

Ahhh... I'm home from work, I've got a beer, a Fluff sandwich, and a review to post.

Enigmo is like Archer Maclean's Mercury meets every laserbeam puzzle ever made.* It's a fine game, if somewhat aesthetically uninspired.

The controls are, again, fundamentally borked thanks to the fact that the player is limited to a single action -- touching objects on the screen. Touching a new tool on the left side of the screen puts that tool "in play." touching a tool in play either allows it to be rotated or dragged to a new location.

Fine.

Except for the fact that whether you'll be dragging or rotating a tool is nearly random, especially depending on how far out the camera is zoomed, and simply touching a top will throw of any fine calibration that may have been set previously.

In fact, getting those fine settings dialed in is an enormous chore in and of itself because the tools have a habit of shifting slightly as the player's enormous sausage-like, level-obscuring finger is lifted from the screen.

If one is looking for an interesting thing to mess around with for a while, or something to show off the processing power of the Touch, this one is basically a success. In terms of actual gameplay, however, it sucks. I mean, the timer-based score concept in this title is completely bullshit. The difference between having never played a level before and having played it one or more times is functionally infinite!

On almost any other platform this would be a genuinely fun title, but on the iPod here it is like an exercise from the Phantom Tollbooth. With all that said, I could see myself poking around at this game again in the future, despite the frustrations I've mentioned. I played this one up to level 16, I don't know how high it goes.

* Yes, I'm going to describe every game with a simile.