Safe Cracker

The activity of safe-cracking usually involves technological and intellectual geniuses working at knobs with deft fingers and stethoscopes. Or at least that's the case if movies aren't lying to us (and why would movies do that?).

The Safe Cracker game by Supergonk is comparatively easy-going. It's less about testing your brain and more about giving your reflexes a bit of a workout.

In fact, you can think of Safe Cracker as a cross between Pachinko and one of those plastic, palm-sized puzzles that challenge you to get a BB in a hole.

That's not to suggest Safe Cracker is necessarily a cheap distraction. It's a pleasant, easy-going time-filler that goes well with some good music. It is, however, repetitive - and the free-to-play model doesn't do it any favours.

Safe Cracker's main character is an elfish woman who's out to tamper with the locks and gears that are keeping her from a massive haul of riches. Its real star, however, is her assistant, Nano.

Nano is a tiny spherical robot capable of slipping into the gears that make up each level. The interior of the gears is composed of several buttons that change from red to blue when Nano rolls on them.

Nano needs to shift every red button to a blue one, but more importantly he needs to collect stars by rolling on star-marked buttons within a certain time limit. Each stage has three stars to collect, and these are vital for opening up new levels.

As you successfully spring gears and send Nano into deeper security layers, hitting all the red switches becomes trickier. Moving platforms get in your way, bumpers send Nano careening around the gear, and marked switches need to be triggered in a certain order.

Regardless of these added challenges, you never really shake the feeling Safe Cracker should be offering you more.

And therein lies the problem: Safe Cracker does offer you more, but locks it up behind paywalls. The Time Attack feature, for instance, makes the game considerably more challenging by asking you to complete levels within a certain time limit. You need to pay for it, which is fair enough, but the game continues to nickel and dime you after that.

For example, you need to pay a separate fee to get rid of adverts (whereas most "free" games throw in the elimination of adverts once you make a purchase), and you need to pay another fee if you want to unlock all the game's levels.

It's possible to unlock all of Safe Cracker's levels by gathering enough stars, but "enough stars" is almost synonymous with "all the stars" - meaning your performance has to be darn near perfect.

Getting three stars on a level is pretty difficult when the game wastes precious seconds by keeping you trapped in a limbo of Nano-flinging bumpers.

While getting three stars on every single level can prove infuriating, Safe Cracker is, for the most part, a simple reflex-based game that's easy to settle into when you have a few minutes to spare. Just don't expect a whole lot out of it, barring some bold grabs for in-app purchases.