Game Reviews

Jenga

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Jenga
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Despite the limitless possibilities presented by your smartphone's touchscreen and accelerometer, NaturalMotion has been reluctant to spoil family favourite Jenga by jazzing it up. What you see is largely what you get.

If you don't know the game, it's played with a tower of fifty-four oblong wooden blocks placed in rows of three side by side, with each tier of blocks placed perpendicular to the one underneath.

You either take turns or play solo, trying to pull any block out from the lower tiers and stick it on top without the tower itself collapsing.

Who lives in a house like this?

NaturalMotion is keen to point out how close Jenga is to the real thing, and to its credit the presentation is impressive, if a little tacky.

The Ikea catalogue background settings are a tad distracting at times, and the 'advanced wood shaders' can have older handsets struggling.

But the controls are intuitive and responsive. You swipe to rotate the tower, tap a block to select it, then tap again to nudge it or slowly drag to pull it out.

White highlights on a block mean it's easy to retrieve, while red ones mean you're risking bringing the tower down.

Angry words with friends

As well as Classic mode there's Arcade mode, which is a surprisingly respectful evolution of the basic premise that introduces colour-matching, power-ups, and playing at speed for score multipliers.

But it all feels a little slim compared to the raft of physics puzzlers available on the format. You'll get the most out of it if you've got friends willing to join in for pass and play.

Despite its missed opportunities, this is about as faithful a digital version of Jenga as you could hope for. If that sounds appealing, consider this a recommendation.

Jenga

Jenga sees a family classic faithfully recreated on your smartphone, though there's not much beyond that to appeal to anyone who doesn't like the original game
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Matthew Lee
Matthew Lee
Matthew's been writing about games for a while, but only recently discovered the joys of Android. It's been a whirlwind romance, but between talking about smartphones, consoles, PCs and a sideline in film criticism he's had to find a way of fitting more than twenty-four hours in a day. It's called sleep deprivation.