Review: Gears
I first saw Gears on the top 10 list in iTunes. The icon was unique, colorful, and featured a ball (hmm, sounds familiar). And it wasn't Angry Birds, so I was intrigued. Not intrigued enough to actually click on the icon, though. It wasn't until I got an email newsletter from Unity3D mentioning the game that I finally clicked through and bought it. See, Gears was developed in Unity, and I've been interested in finally learning Unity development. I've got one more game in the works that I'm going to make with cocos2d, and after that I'm going to give Unity a shot. Anyway, I was curious to see what this dev team was able to create, so I nabbed their app.
Gears, despite the name, is a regular "labyrinth"-type game, where you roll a ball around various obstacles in an attempt to beat the clock in each level. The "gears" moniker fits in because a large component of each level are spinning gears that the player must navigate. Each maze consists of said gears, plus other elevated platforms. Of course, there are obstacles that you must confront, such as locked gates and exploding boxes. There are a number of collectable tokens strewn throughout each level as well; you've got to collect them all in order to get the best possible score.
The graphics are good, but a bit dark. Sometimes it's hard to appreciate the detail that obviously went in to the art assets. Each game world is set underground, so there's not a whole lot of variation. I'm kind of a fan of "blue sky in games", so I wouldn't have minded some different environments.
The physics are also good, of course, since the game is made with Unity. Each maze is truly three-dimensional, so you might have to make the ball fall downwards, or have to confront sloping platforms. There's even trampolines in a few of the levels. If your ball falls off the maze, you're able to try again from the most recent checkpoint you passed. If you fall off more than once or twice, the level is then almost impossible to complete (due to not having enough time), necessitating that you navigate to the menu to manually restart the stage. At least the developers had the foresight to include a "swiping" style control method as well as accelerometer control, otherwise the game would be unplayable (I hate accelerometer-based games).
On the whole, I think Gears is a decent title. What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in presentation and accessibility.
★★★☆☆ — Gears on the App Store
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