Fantastic Contraption

It sounds trite, but Fantastic Contraption is like one of its own primitive machines. Once you’ve spent enough time figuring out what to do with all the bits and bobbles the ordinary suddenly becomes remarkably dynamic and entertaining.

It’s a laborious and irksome experience making something out of a pile of nothing, but once it does come together it’s astoundingly addictive.

It’s a game that appears reluctant to reveal its good qualities until, with a single button press, all your frustrating effort pays off, and a… well, fantastic contraption springs to life after a massively delayed reaction. The suspense makes the game immensely difficult to stop playing.

You’re presented with a light blue box housing a small red shape, which is a simple interpretation of a workshop. The light pink box elsewhere on the screen is your goal.

Getting the red geometric shape to the goal means cobbling together a system of wheels, weights, and axels for transport. There are wheels that turn clockwise, for example, which can be fixed to your object using different types of axels to form crude vehicles.

Once the spot-on physics kick in, you begin to see the mechanics of design. As your creations fail in their intended use, it's back to the workshop for tweaks and improvements. There’s a limited selection of components, so devising a system that won’t stick on a corner or collapse in on itself is the core challenge.

Many of these mechanisms can become quite complex as you nail on extra parts, push others together and rearrange bits in an attempt to make the damn thing work.

Assembly on a small screen would be impossible without the up-close view that appears in the top corner of the screen. It’s this feature alone that makes Fantastic Contraption work on the iPhone, but it also highlights one of the game’s inherent problems: it becomes exasperating just putting these contraptions together.

The cluttered interface does the intricacy of assembly absolutely no favour. Trying to place an axel on a wheel while the instructions keep popping up under your finger is the worst culprit, especially on level 30 when that instruction sheet is completely redundant.

There’s also no particular method to solving the individual problems. This is essentially the point of the game, but the upshot is you tend to put the same components together in pretty much the same configuration every time and then harass it into working.

A more structured approach or nuanced guidance would do much to encourage variety in construction. As it is, randomly modifying a basic template is sufficient to get through the game.

Despite these inherent flaws, Fantastic Contraption boasts an addictive quality normally reserved for the likes of Tetris, Bejeweled or nicotine. As much as it chews on your nerve endings at times, you’ll invariably find yourself losing hours to the manufacture of these damnable machines.

So even though the price point seems rather high for a game you can play for free on the internet, Fantastic Contraption is still appealing. Just don’t expect every minute to be entertaining, because it’s a pretty even split between invigorating fun and painful perseverance.