Review: Triomino!
Score:
82%
Any fast-paced puzzle game is going to be welcomed on my Windows Phone, so the news that Beautiful Mind Games has released another game which mixes some classic puzzle genres to great effect made my weekend. Here's why.
Version Reviewed: 1.1.0.0
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Beautiful Mind Games are past masters at this sort of game, but Triomino! takes a slightly different tack. Normally the team take a very simple concept for a game, ensure there is a very simple single-screen interface around that concept, and then provide an almost overpowering number of options to allow the player to set up the game to suit their taste. That's not the case here, as Beautiful Mind Games has seriously dialled back on the options.
The only option you have in Triomino! is over the size of the game grid size to choose from (5x5, 6x6, or 7x7 are available). This makes Triomino! a more accessible game when you start to play, at the expense of longevity. I think that's a fair trade for the developer to make, because if you don't get the players involved and hooked into the game at the start, it doesn't matter how many gaming hours could be on offer.
The game itself takes two concepts and mashes them together. The first is Tetris, and the various blocks made up of four small squares. This game only uses three blocks (the clue is in the title), and not every combination of shape you can make. The potential 3x1 design is missing, with just the corner piece made available, in one of four potential orientations.
The other concept taken is the 'Dr Mario/Columns' idea of matching two similarly coloured tiles. When they do match, the matching smaller squares will vanish, leaving you more space on the game grid to place more pieces. It's important to note that you can't spin your pieces to fit them in a gap on the board or change the order of the colours in the piece. What you see is what you have to place.
This actually provides you with a very tactical game to play. Because you can see the next piece to play after the current piece, you can think ahead both to the gaps that are existing on the game board, and the gap you can make with good placement. Of course, every move you make adds three blocks to the game board, and a single vanish only removes two blocks, so you need to work on getting two colours matched on the majority of moves, or you will rapidly run out of space on the board.
Triomino! is a fast game to play, and that's an advantage for a mobile game. It has a good balance of tactics forcing you to think about the game, and after an addictive hour of play I get the feeling that luck is not a huge factor in the game. If you play smart when playing your pieces, then you can have a comparatively long game.
It's interesting that when you play on the smaller grids, luck plays a bigger part of the game than the games you play on the larger grids. This is down to the design of the game, but it does mean that the game feels subtly different as you move up the sizes. It's not enough to say there are two or three different games on offer here, but the 5x5, 6x6, and 7x7 grids all feel different, which is nice to have.
On top of the in-game high score (made up of how many blocks you manage to match in the game) you also have an online high-score table where you can submit your name and compare your score to everyone else who is playing Triomino! around the world. This is a nice touch which the developers use across all their titles, so it is expected.
Beautiful Mind Games has managed to land another solid hit with Triomino! It's not a must-download A-list game, but it does continue a solid run of games in the 'second tier' of casual games on Windows Phone. The developers have taken a great game concept, they have coded around it very well, and it's all packaged up and presented cleanly and clearly to the players.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at