Game Reviews

Polygon Evolution

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Polygon Evolution

Designing a new puzzle game isn't an enviable task, but it can be a worthwhile one.

We smartphone gamers love a good puzzler, and we reward the ones that grab us by the thumbs and refuse to let go by playing them to death.

But that means there's a lot of pressure when a dev approaches a new puzzle concept. And sometimes, that pressure can lead to over-complication.

Dots, dashes, squares, and triangles

Polygon Evolution is set out on a game board built from hexagons. Inside some of these are simplistic symbols, but the majority of the shapes are blank.

You can place a dot in any tile adjacent to one that already contains a symbol. Line up three dots and they merge, replacing the final dot you dropped with a single tile containing a line.

Put down a straight row of three lines, and they merge into a cross, once again replacing the final tile that you positioned.

As you can imagine it takes some degree of forethought to arrange three rows of dots so they combine into a line on exactly the right tile.

And it keeps going. Line up three crosses to form a triangle, three triangles to form a square, and so on.

Throw in local and online multiplayer, and you've got a very challenging puzzle game that sits precariously between Bejeweled and chess.

Point of the puzzle

While you're placing your dots about the board, black dots start to appear.

Although a lot of the time they'll hinder your progress and muck up your strategy, they're not exactly the enemy. These dark dots work in exactly the same way as their pale cousins, so you can employ them in creating lines as well.

They're comparable to a virus, filling up spaces without any care. And their appearance adds some much-needed conflict to the gameplay.

Polygon Evolution's biggest issue is a lack of purpose. Your ultimate goal is a little woolly. You can keep creating more and more complex tiles, and increasing your score. But other than eventually running out of space, there's never an end in sight.

But there's something about the game's nature that suggests there's an ultimate move around the corner. Some brilliantly executed strategy that will combine your tiles into one glorious, crowing, level-completing whole. But this, it seems, never happens.

This isn't a quick, clean, and clever puzzle game. It's a complex and demanding strategy game. And anyone who stumbles into it unaware is likely to end up frustrated and confused.

It takes some serious dedication to get the hang of, but if you're looking for an intense, visual intelligence test, Polygon Evolution will, eventually, deliver in droves.

Polygon Evolution

If you're willing to put the work in, there's a great puzzling strategy game to uncover here
Score
Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.