Touch Physics

The trouble with the sciences is that they come loaded with connotations for those of us whose scientific careers peaked when we discovered how to electrocute our tongue with a 9v battery.

Memories of science as a classroom torture device have made words like ‘physics’ far too serious to consider in our gaming habits. Touch Physics challenges that prejudice, taking boring concepts like gravity, weight, and inertia and making them fun.

We’ve seen a couple of these physics-based games on the iPhone recently, and it wasn’t until playing Touch Physics that it became apparent how serious, over-intelligent or complicated those other titles attempt to be.

Quite why they all choose to be represented by crayon doodles on bits of crumpled old paper is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, Touch Physics adopts the standard objective of the physics game genre: get thing A (a blue circle) to thing B (a yellow star.) You do this by drawing shapes on the screen with your finger, after which the shapes interact with the rest of the level’s scenery and, hopefully, convince the blue circle to roll over to its goal.

Many of these tasks are completed through brute force. It doesn't always suffice, but bashing a smaller thing with a bigger thing is definitely a tactic from which you’ll get a lot of mileage.

Shunting the small blue circle across the screen can be done by drawing a large circle above it, for instance. Once sketched, it's assigned a comparative weight and inertia and sends the circle off moving when the two connect.

It’s like playing vertical snooker with a huge cue ball that’s dropped on a smaller one to bash it into the pocket.

You’re also required to draw straight lines and the occasional clever shape to help support the makeshift structures. Basic physical mechanics affect construction, just as in reality.

Even though it gets a tad repetitive, it’s also worth giving the soundtrack a round of applause. The classical guitar accompaniment really gives Touch Physics a pleasant feel. If it had a few more tracks to stop the music getting stuck in your head so easily, it would be a significant plus point to the game’s overall score.

In many respects there’s less to do in Touch Physics than in its competitors. No clever pivot points, ropes or elaborate shapes (draw something fancy and it automatically adjusts it into a basic geometric form).

But for reasons that aren’t entirely obvious, this boosts the game’s accessibility. You know that on a difficult level you’re not failing because you don’t have an engineering degree. It’s reassuring to know it can be solved with some basic, albeit well-placed, block-building.

This is a game that, through careful refinement, is sweetly addictive and very easy on the nerves. Finding a game that actively helps toward a good evening’s chill out session is quite unusual, but Touch Physics is one of them.