Game Reviews

Circuits

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Circuits
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Circuits is a difficult game to pin a genre on. It's a musical puzzler, a memory game with beats and twinkling electronic soundscapes, a join-the-dots task mixed up with an ambient game of pattern recognition.

It's looks great, whatever it is, and the idea at its core, about re-threading pieces of music together, is an interesting one.

But it never quite manages to spark into life. You're slotting together the songs and recreating the tunes, and while it can be challenging, it's never actually that much fun.

Chip tunes

Each of the levels is a line punctuated by little cells. These coloured circles, which stretch off the main line like the branches of a tree, represent parts of a song that have been removed. You can listen to the song as a whole, or just the sections of different coloured blobs that are missing.

Along the bottom of the screen sits a selection of coloured circles. It's your job to match them to the spaces above. Tapping on them plays the music they contain. You need to listen to the main song, and figure out which of the circles goes where.

More often than not there are more circles than spaces to slot them into, and as you play through the game the extra sounds become more and more similar to the correct parts of the tune, meaning you have to listen extra carefully to spot the right chunk to pop in.

The tunes get more complex too, with multiple sections and parts of the tune that branch off into intricate webways of their own. It's a sometimes hypnotic experience, but there's a lack of crunch to the actual gameplay that leaves you cold.

Sound track

Essentially, you'll spend your time rewinding, checking, re-checking, and then repeating, and it doesn't make for the most exciting of experiences. The songs are nice, but listening to them over and over means their appeal diminishes pretty quickly.

The UI isn't that great either, and you'll find yourself forgetting which of the various play buttons you need to tap more than once.

It's a shame, because there is a neat idea here, and the presentation is impressive. Circuits is fun for a while, but it loses its way the further you get into it.

Circuits

While it does have its moments, Circuits never quite manages to reconcile its free-flowing musical heart with its cumbersome puzzling
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.