Game Reviews

Pipe Mania (Smartphone)

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Pipe Mania (Smartphone)

Having plumbing problems is like a rite of passage. We're not talking about your internal pipes, here (though that comes with age), but at some point you'll probably get to experience a flooded kitchen or lounge as a pipe somewhere just gives up and lets it all go.

Pipe Mania is about making sure this moment doesn't happen as you're constructing whole pipe systems seconds before the water is turned on.

Each level is made up of a grid of squares, an entrance, and an exit. You need to connect the latter two using various pipe tiles, curved and straight. The catch is that you don't have much of a choice about which pieces you get to lay. Instead, you can only see which bits of pipe you’ll have at your disposal for the next few turns.

Not all the pipes have to be used: you can just dump some off on unused grid squares at the cost of some points, while points are gained for each piece of properly laid pipe. Unlike real plumbing systems, Pipe Mania is all about making your piping as long as possible.

Not every level involves carrying water through bog-standard pipes. There are seven different worlds, each of which has a different theme, from the sewers to the highways of the Internet. Add these to Arcade, Bonus and Classic modes and you have a game that offers solid value.

Unfortunately, Pipe Mania doesn't always go with the flow. New elements are gradually introduced through the course of the game, but not all of them work as well as intended. One is the random pipe square, which cycles through each pipe type until you press it onto a grid square and tap, laying the pipe type showing at that point.

Annoyingly, you can't see what's under your finger at the point you do this. We could forgive this if the piece was genuinely random, but it's not. It's right there under your finger, you just can't see it - and when you're under pressure, which you generally are in Pipe Mania, it becomes a bit of an irritant.

There's also the game's tendency to refuse to give you the right piece at critical moments. You can easily find yourself tapping away at a square more than a dozen times, laying pipe pieces on top of each other without ever having the right piece turn up.

Perhaps it’s just gamer's paranoia, but the game's uncompromising nature occasionally veers into punishment territory. Marry annoyances like these to the game's harsh level of difficulty and you've got a recipe for frustration.

These moments won't mar the moment of euphoric triumph when you finally get the liquid/trains/bytes to flow on down the drain/tunnel/port, but they stop Pipe Mania from becoming the casual iPhone classic of our pipe dreams.

Pipe Mania (Smartphone)

Pipe Mania is a worthy revamp of the classic original but a few irksome game elements mixed with tough difficulty stop it from battling with the best
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