Game Reviews

Denki Blocks Deluxe XHD

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Denki Blocks Deluxe XHD

We can forget a lot of our everyday troubles when absorbed in a good puzzler, all the while telling ourselves that we're doing something cognitively worthwhile. We’re exercising our brain, right?

Whether that’s the case or not, there are some games you can’t help but lose hours to. Denki Blocks Deluxe XHD just about falls into this category. It exudes charm, and it'll keep you busy for a long time.

Colour me puzzled

It's also far from being a pushover. The screen presents you with a number of small blocks that you have to connect complete the level. You can connect them in any direction, and once you do they fuse together.

To complicate matters, all the blocks move at the same time. When you drag your finger up, they all go up; move down and they all go down. This means you have to use the walls and other immovable blocks in order to get the Denki blocks to meet.

It’s a very simple formula with a lot of thought required, especially in later levels. These introduce multiple colours of block, meaning you have to navigate them around each other to make red meet red and green meet green.

Master strokes

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Denki Blocks Deluxe XHD is its attitude to difficulty. Each level (of which there are more than a hundred) requires same-coloured blocks to touch, but if you’re after a harder time you can attempt the Master challenge. There's no mode to select to reach this - it's simply an optional part of each level. One of the many possible solutions.

Levels can get exceptionally tricky, too. Often you have to get all blocks to fuse into a particular shape or complete the puzzle within a set number of moves. It adds a lot of complexity to what could have been a much breezier game.

Unfortunately, Denki Blocks Deluxe XHD is not precisely built for the Xperia Play, despite being listed as ‘optimised’ for the device. You can use the touchpad to move the blocks, but the screen always remains in portrait mode, even with the control pad out.

This makes for some awkward holding. The truth is that this game was made with a touchscreen in mind, and it’s much better just to play it that way.

Apart from this lack of an alternative control scheme and some over-sensitive touchscreen movement at times, Denki Blocks Deluxe XHD is an accessible and addictive puzzle game that deserves a few hours of your time.

Denki Blocks Deluxe XHD

Blocky games are always welcome on phones, and although Denki Blocks Deluxe XHD doesn’t make use of this particular handset, that doesn’t stop it from being a solid puzzler
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Brendan Caldwell
Brendan Caldwell
Brendan is a boy. Specifically, a boy who plays games. More specifically, a nice boy who plays many games. He often feels he should be doing something else. That's when the siren call of an indie gem haunts him. Who shall win this battle of wills? Answer: not Brendan.