Game Reviews

Lock 'n' Roll

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| Lock 'n' Roll Pro
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Lock 'n' Roll
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| Lock 'n' Roll Pro

Every person has his favourite childhood game, the one that always used to be pulled out on rainy holidays or family get-togethers.

Mine was Yahtzee. If you haven't heard of it before, it's a very simple game comprising of five dice, which you use to try and form poker-like hands (straights, full houses, etc).

The makers of Lock 'n' Roll are clearly big fans of the game, although their new Android title applies quite a few neat twists to the formula.

Roll with the hunches

You have just the four dice to play with here, and each one defies physics by only having four sides, representing the numbers one to four. As well as coming up with a random number, each die will take on one of four random colours – blue, green, red, or yellow.

In keeping with this theme of fours, you must lay your freshly rolled dice out on a four by four game grid. You get points for forming groups or lines of dice by colour, by numerical value, or (ideally) by both in combination.

Only high-value hands will disappear from the board, and as it's Game Over once the board is filled the onus on scoring highly is clear. The addition of jokers, once you've accrued enough points, helps build effective combinations of hands.

Do Yahtzee what I did there?

It’s a far simpler game to play than it is to describe. Canned Bananas evidently struggled to articulate this too, judging by the two 'help' sections (which left me a little confused) and a link to a YouTube demonstration (which cleared things up, when the demonstrator’s head wasn't getting in the way).

Indeed, the game's presentation has a generally amateurish feel to it that detracts slightly from the core experience. It's functional, but it lacks that layer of polish that encourages you to spend hours in a game's company.

While it has a few rough areas that need sanding down, Lock 'n' Roll riffs on the Yahtzee rule-set nicely. It stands as one of the more interesting puzzle games on the Android Market.

Lock 'n' Roll

While it needs a fair bit of sanding and polishing, Lock 'n' Roll proves to be a fun and interesting take on Yahtzee-style dice-rolling
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Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.