Review:
Blokuz iPhone App Review

Blokuz is a pretty straight forward puzzle game from Pythongem. If you've ever played games like Jewel Quest, you'll be familiar to the kind of mechanics that play into Blokuz's gameplay. However, instead of switching gems in order to eliminate the pieces and advance to the next level, you have to eliminate them in groups.

When you start up Blokuz, you'll be greeted to a rectangular grid filled with colored tiles. If you touch a tile, that tile and any others that are touching it (and any touching those) will highlight. If you tap the tiles again, you'll elimante them. The catch though, is that you cannot eliminate single tiles. They have to be at least in groups of two. After you've successfully eliminated all the tiles in the level, you'll proceed to the next puzzle. Each level gets harder and harder, and once you've made it past the first few levels you'll quickly find that there is a strategy to eliminating tiles. As you remove tiles from the grid, the tiles fall tetris style and arrange themselves to the bottom left of the grid. What this means is that tiles that might have been touching before may no longer be connected. With this in mind it's important to carefully pick and choose which groups of tiles to eliminate.

Oftentimes, I find that trying to eliminate groups that are closer to the top of the grid helps.

Blokuz has three different game modes: One, Mono, and Duel. One is the straightforward gameplay I described above. Mono takes a spin on the gameplay by hiding all the tiles minesweeper style. If you touch a tile, it'll light up into its colored form and any like tiles touching it will also light up, adding to the difficulty of the game. In Duel, you take turns going back and forth between two separate Blokuz puzzles. Beware, though, if you lose in one puzzle you lose for the whole level.

Presentation-wise, Blokuz is pretty dull. While the sound effects are appropriate, they're nothing spectacular. Also, if you were to just pick up this game and try to play it, it might take a little while to figure out how to play. To make things worse, there's usually only one correct way to solve the puzzle, which means that if you make a wrong move early on, you're effectively screwed for the rest of the puzzle. The help section struggles to act as the "instruction booklet", but it's not explained very well. On the upside, you can listen to your iPod's music library while you play. In addition, there's an online leaderboard so you can try and beat other people's high scores.