Crafty Creatures

A quick look at the App Store will tell you that iOS gamers are not starved for choice when it comes to physics-based puzzle games. A developer will really need to try if it hopes to outpace the established giants like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope.

A rare few developers, however, don't seem concerned with trying to keep up with the Joneses (or Rovios), instead creating brave and innovative puzzle games.

Crafty Creatures is one such game. Sort of. While parts of it feel incredibly familiar - more on that later - the disparate elements of the game come together to form a unique and enjoyable puzzle-solving experience.

Crafty Creatures is set in a fanciful world of cloth scraps and cardboard boxes, with the currency of the realm being buttons.

Events kick off when a cardboard tornado (yes, you read that properly) blows through town and flings creature and cloth alike across the game's many levels.

The majority of these levels follow a simple formula: guide your rolling cloth creature around until it touches another cloth creature already in the level, and collect as many of the buttons as possible along the way.

Cardboard obstacles get in your way, but you can remove these easily with a single tap.

Doing so will subject anything above the obstacle to the relentless pull of gravity, however, and so careful experimentation and timing are key to solving the more complex levels.

In the course of solving puzzles in Crafty Creatures you'll have to carefully co-ordinate falling blocks so that they land in place of gaps and pits. This element becomes routine after a few levels, but the game mixes things up by adding angled blocks, multiple-drop block sequences, and simultaneous creature drops.

Unfortunately, the physics engine is a bit slow to render at times, and so blocks and creatures will fall, roll, and bounce at positively glacial speeds.

While this makes the puzzle-solving easier to work through initially, it can be quite frustrating to watch your creature roll with all the urgency of a sleepy sloth on the fifth or sixth time playing through a level.

Sacked?

It's impossible to talk about Crafty Cratures without mentioning LittleBigPlanet.

Developed by Nordisk Film, which is no stranger to working with Sony, Crafty Creatures looks like a homage to both the art-style and community of LittleBigPlanet.

The game encourages you to create and customise your own creature out of fabric, patterns, and other cloth crafting components (zipper mouths and googly eyeballs all feature) and then use it to play through a series of levels.

Initially, you have a limited range of customisation options and colours, but as you earn or buy more buttons an increasing array of fabrics, patterns, and options are made available.

Once you've created a particularly well-crafted creature, you can name it and upload it to the community so that other players can rate it. Both rating and being rated earn buttons, and so the community focus is ingrained into Crafty Creatures from the outset.

Another familiar feature is the level creator. With 50 stock levels spread across five unique chapters, Crafty Creatures is not short on puzzle variety, but it also encourages you to build and share your own colourful and challenging levels with other players around the world.

This level creator helps to ensure that you'll never run out of content to play through in Crafty Creatures. Whether you're sharing levels with an unknown player in Belarus or handing your iPad to a friend so he can play through your latest creation, the exchange of ideas - and creativity - remains unaltered.

But it would be intensely unfair to dismiss Crafty Creatures as a LittleBigPlanet clone. While the feel of the game is markedly similar to LittleBigPlanet, the focus on bite-sized physics puzzling helps the game stand on its own.

Additionally, the fact that Crafty Creatures lets you create and share your own characters and levels provides a welcome break from the staid three-star scoring mechanic that has dominated the physics-based puzzle genre.

The end result is a game that incorporates familiar elements from other titles but looks and feels fresh while doing it.