Tangram Super Shapes
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| Tangram

It's hard work being an infant. All of those square pegs, round holes, isometric shapes and complementary colours. It's a veritable assault on the fragile senses of a tyke and is the source of much frustration and ire during those all important formative years.

What's worse is just as you seem to be getting the hang of some of your endless supply of learning toys, you're chided for turning the living room carpet into a sea of plastic blocks. Your day's worth of hard work and learning culminates in being told off, creating the feeling that there was little point in being sat down in front of said toys in the first place.

Ultimately, playing Tangram Super Shapes feels sort of similar to this common frustrating childhood experience and, unfortunately, not in a fondly nostalgic way.

Unless you are either from China or a whiz with general knowledge, you might not know what a tangram is. The dictionary definition states it's "a Chinese puzzle consisting of a square cut into five triangles, a square, and a rhomboid, which can be combined so as to form a great variety of other figures".

It is this picture game that makes up the entirety of Tangram Super Shape's gameplay and it could not be any simpler than that. You use the thumbstick (or the '2' and '4' keys) to move the cursor over to the piece you want from a row at the bottom of the screen.

You then pick said piece using '5' and manoeuvre it into place on the empty picture using the '2', '4', '6' and '8' keys, pressing '5' again to lock it into place. You can rotate the shapes left and right using the '1' and '3' keys, and if you want to put a shape back into the row at the bottom and instead work with another, all you have to do is press '0'.

Got all that?

It all works fluidly enough, though sometimes manoeuvring the shapes into place is made difficult by a lack of sensitivity in the controls, meaning you either over- or undershoot your positioning.

Once you have completed a picture, it is on to the next, and so on through the 100 different shapes that are on offer in the Arcade mode. The images include everything from animals to humanoid shapes to shapes that defy category.

The game is fairly polished and does offer a rounded package. You get an excruciatingly over-explained tutorial to trudge through, the aforementioned Arcade mode, as well as Time Challenge, Random and Creation options.

These combine to form an experience that will take even the most gifted geometric wizard weeks to finish. The problem, however, is in whether anyone would actually want to play Tangram Super Shapes until the end. The reward for finishing one fiendishly difficult but bland puzzle is another fiendishly difficult bland puzzle and before long, memories of going cross-eyed on the living room floor, longing for Lego will come flooding back.

Ultimately, what starts off as a genuinely taxing puzzler soon becomes a bland and uninteresting affair, which is only compounded by the repetitive music (which thankfully can be turned off). Static brain-teasing puzzlers need plenty in the way of personality and charm to keep grip on your attention, and these are aspects that are noticeably lacking here.

That said, it is perhaps unfair to criticize Tangram Super Shapes just for being what it is. Because, as a mobile realization of the Chinese game, it has certainly been thoughtfully assembled and offers a generous quantity of modes. But you'll probably want to play it in controlled doses.

Tangram Super Shapes

Not a bad effort, all in all – the wealth of levels and modes is welcome but the presentation and game itself is just a little flavourless
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