Snap is a card game that we first came into contact with when we were five and enjoyed for a whole week before moving on to less excruciatingly boring pastimes. So when
Twice! – a game founded on the basic principles of snap – turned up at the
Pocket Gamer office for review, it's not like we started hyperventilating in the way that excited children tend to.
But upon playing
Twice! it seems our scepticism was ill founded as though the concept may sound a bit bland, the game succeeds in being an enjoyable puzzler and has a good stab at living up to HeroCraft's claim that it's an effective memory training tool.
You start with a grid and can uncover up to three blocks at a time. If you make a match, the pair remain exposed; if you fail to make a match, your available number of tries reduces by one. Fail to match every pair in the grid before you run out of tries, you lose a life and have to start again. As you progress, the grids get increasingly bigger and comprise different shapes.
The controls use the old '2', '4', '6' and '8' keys or the thumbstick for movement set-up, with uncovering a tile assigned to the '5' key.
Besides the two extra modes – Agile, which is a time trial variant and Smart, which puts your memory skills up against a full screen-filling grid – there's not much else, really. But it is addictive stuff and the inclusion of a try limit really adds an element of challenge where other games of the same format often belittle the difficulty by allowing as many tries as you like (
Hentai Pairs, anyone?).
Besides that,
Twice! isn't half bad to look at, either. The in-game grids are nicely animated and the sparkling cascades of stars that introduce the levels really brighten the screen.
Even in spite of this obvious levels of quality and satisfying challenge available here, there is little to dispute that at its core,
Twice! is built on a very simple and repetitive formula. And though it might feel reassuring to see that your brain functions properly, the long-term appeal of the gameplay isn't a strong point.
Even so,
Twice! is about as good as games based on snap get. If you're looking for something super-casual that will also help give your memory a bit of a tune up, then
Twice! should suit you perfectly.
