Review: Mega Tic Tac Toe
Score:
73%
Following on from Dots Master, developer Noam Behar brings another classic pencil and paper game to Windows Phone. Mega Tic Tac Toe continues the real-world look, and brings an engrossing challenge to gamers on the Windows Phone platform.
Version Reviewed: 2.9.0.0
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While the name Mega Tic Tac Toe might put you in mind of some sort of super-sized noughts and crosses, the title (much like AE's Boxed In, earlier in the week) is a reworked classic. You have a large game grid, and take turns against your opponent placing down a single stone on this grid to try and create a five-in-a-row line to win the game. This line can be horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, but must be uninterrupted. How well does developer Noam Behar's version work on Windows Phone? Quite nicely, thank you very much.
This is an implementation of Gomoku, the traditional board game played on a Go board with black and white pieces. Rather than the complicated game of Go, Gomoku (derived from the Japanese 'five pieces') is simply about taking turns to try and get the line you need to win. Mega Tic Tac Toe is as good a name as any for the game.
The core is the single player game, where you are up against the AI. It can play at five levels (but the two highest, Expert and Master, are not available in the free version of the app), and while it has little impact on the game, you can choose to play as 'O' or 'X' (which are also colour coded to aid recognition when playing.
Tapping a square is all you need to do to play a piece on the game board. You also have the option to zoom in or out of the game board, and a swiped finger that will let you scroll around the board. A nice simple user interface, although it's a shame that pinch to zoom is not implemented. And that's about it really, although you can toggle the sound on and off as well.
Sitting alongside the AI are two multiplayer modes. The 2 Player game is a 'pass the handset' around affair where you use the phone as your game board and not much else, while the `Network Game' will let you go online (using either the Skiller multiplayer SDK, or logging in via Facebook) and begin match ups with opponents from around the world. It's a nice touch, but I'm more than happy with the skill-set offered by the computer AI.
Mega Tic Tac Toe is bright and cheerful. Following the Dots game, there is a certain pen and paper feel to it, from the graphics that ape a hand drawn game on graph paper to the (almost unforgiveable) use of Comic Sans as a font throughout the game. The scratchy pen on paper sound as you make a move only adds to this skeuomorphic charm. Thankfully Behar has committed to this themed vision throughout all the code for the game which helps keep up the illusion. There's no point where the game or the menus are bogged down in too much information.
There's not much you can add to Gomoku on a computing platform without taking away the essence of the game. If you enjoy the mix of strategy and logic, then all you need is a title that does the basics very well. And there's no doubt in my mind that Mega Tic Tac Toe does the basics very well. Graphics are clear, sounds are crisp, and it provides a good challenge on a mobile device. That's a winning combination in my book, even though I know that any Gomoku title is going to have niche appeal.
That's fine, gamers need niches just as much as we need globally acceptable avian throwing challenges. Mega Tic Tac Toe is not only a welcome title on my handset - I can even forgive it using Comic Sans.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at