Game Reviews

Slide to Finish

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iOS
| Slide to Finish
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Slide to Finish
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iOS
| Slide to Finish

Slide to Finish would be overbearingly cute if it weren't for two things.

First, it's damned weird. You're a scarf-wearing bear with a magic pen, sketching out paths and jumps to guide your toboggan to the level exit. If you can grab some carrots for your two hare buddies along the way, more's the better.

I don't know whether to say "ahh" or "ehh?"

Hare's breadth

But the second and most important reason we can overlook the high levels of saccharine on display here is that the game is really quite tough.

Oh, sure, any mug with half a brain can sketch out a curved ramp and a landing point to guide the toboggan gracefully towards the exit.

But getting all three carrots into the bargain? That's another matter entirely once you've negotiated the early levels.

Sketchy controls

Getting a clean sweep in many of the levels here requires patience, precision, and creativity.

I struggle for patience at the best of times, and the game itself clearly struggles for precision - especially when it comes to iPhone users. Even with a traditional pinch-to-zoom system, it's very tricky to get exactly the result you want without considerable tinkering.

That tinkering can be executed with enough care, with each drawn line breaking down naturally into a number of jointed components. But it remains a fiddly and haphazard process, and you'll often accidentally twist up your line where you wanted to move it.

Call it a draw

Fortunately, these frustrations aren't enough to obliterate the game's reward for creativity.

Many of the courses require you to think up elaborate double-backs and to employ the cunning use of momentum and gravity - your magic pen has limited ink, after all.

It's a shame that Slide to Finish's woolly controls get in the way of such creativity a little too often, or we'd be talking about one of the more accomplished physics puzzlers of recent months.

Slide to Finish

A cute and clever physics puzzler that can't quite provide the accurate control system to facilitate its creative solutions
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.