Anyone over the age of 25 will surely be hit by a warm wave of nostalgia when first playing
Domino Story. Being a little under this age, it wasn't until I had made my way through the first ten or so levels of the game that I managed to trawl through my memory to find where this nagging sense of deja vu was coming from.
Then I recalled the old Ocean Software adverts that used to appear in the PC games magazines I read until the covers fell off in the 1990s.
Domino Story cannot help but engender comparisons to Ocean's classic 1992 puzzler
Pushover, right down to the same red and yellow coloured dominos.
You play as Nails Mamboo, a meerkat treasure hunter who has uncovered the ancient ruins of a meerkat temple. To get your hands on the temple's treasure, you need to complete 50 puzzles that involve felling every domino in sight, often requiring mind-boggling chain reactions to be set up and flawlessly executed.
While getting a series of dominos to fall may not sound like much of a challenge,
Domino Story makes matters difficult by throwing dominos into the mix that behave differently to ordinary ones as well as multi-leveled playing areas. There are always specified 'start' and 'finish' dominos as well, so there is no real way to dodge the game's puzzling situations.
As Nails, you'll have to run about the screen collecting dominos, barrels and platform-destroying sticks of dynamite, and arranging them into a chain that'll knock over every single domino.
As might be imagined, in later levels things get pretty tricky, and the learning curve is not for the faint-hearted. Although there are some simplistic introductory levels, these are really used just to introduce the basic game elements and it's not long before some real brain power is required. Anyone after a game that doesn't require total concentration should look elsewhere, as playing
Domino Story passively will lead only to infuriation.
More could certainly have been done to massage away some of this tension – while the puzzles themselves should not be begrudged for their difficulty, other elements are more irritating. Why, for example, does our mammalian protagonist have to walk so slowly when carrying something? This isn't an action game, and slowing things down feels like wasting time. Movement in general feels clunky too, giving the game a dated feel.
It might seem foolish to criticise the game for feeling a little creaky when it wears its unofficial
Pushover dues on its sleeves, but it seems at odds with
Domino Story's general presentation. Although the game's opening introduction does feel a little cheap and cheerful, the in-game graphics aren't too bad at all, appearing colourful and impenetrably jolly.
Unfortunately, the upbeat music would also not be out of place accompanying a saccharine montage in an embarassingly upbeat family film and, at times – such as when attempting a level for the dozenth time – this is really not what you want to hear. Something more existential-sounding would represent the mood better. The complete lack of sound effects is also unfortunate, but perhaps no great loss since they'd likely become equally irritating in those frustrating moments.
Domino Story is a game that pushes back the boundaries of mobile gaming – not the boundaries of innovation, but of frustration. If you're a brave and patient gamer,
Domino Story offers a lot of gameplay for your money, and a seriously tough challenge. For the rest of us, the undeniable compulsion to play that it inspires will likely be outweighed too soon by sheer irritation – consider
Domino Quake instead.
