Review
Milking it
by RevStu (October 26th, 2010 at 11:51 am)
With so many iPod games offering such incredible value for money, it’s a real shame when you see someone ruin the chances of a potentially great app by being overly greedy. Such is the fate of Little Big Mobile’s debut iPod release, Konex Puzzle.
The screenshot above (in which your task is to separate out 16 items into four groups of four connected ones) will be instantly familiar to fans of highbrow UK quiz show Only Connect, starring the thinking maths nerd’s hottie, poker star and writer Victoria Coren. Now someone’s made a (sadly Victoria Coren-less) version for the iPod, which should be brilliant news but isn’t.
The problem with Konex Puzzle isn’t the puzzles, which are excellent and fully in keeping with those seen on the show. The problem is that the game’s developers are so hungry for money that they’ve put out a desperately anorexic collection of them. The core version, which is free, contains just 15 – five each in Easy (which are really more of a tutorial), Normal and Hard categories. These 15 will detain you for perhaps 10 minutes in total (the game’s stat screen shows my average time for clearing the lot as 43 seconds per puzzle), and then you’re offered the chance to buy two more level packs (or “Wall Banks”) for 59p/€0,79/99¢ each.
That’s all well and good, but the problem is that the level packs also comprise a pathetically stingy 15 levels each. The first pack (“Wall Bank B”) has five of each difficulty again (so by the time you’ve done the insultingly simple Easy ones you’ve got roughly seven minutes of puzzling left in the whole pack), while the second one at least does away with Easy walls, giving you 10 Normal and 5 Hard. But even Wall Bank C will struggle to keep you going for more than quarter of an hour, and that means your total purchase price of £1.19/€1,59/$1.99 will have bought you less than 30 minutes of game, which in App Store terms is an absolute gouging.
If you want to play Only Connect, the BBC website for the show currently offers a total of 60 walls to play for free, 15 more than even the maximum Konex Puzzle experience (and with no baby ones bulking out the package). The Beeb gives you the full version of the game (where you get extra points for identifying the connections), and even features Victoria herself sternly dismissing your wrong answers. Until Little Big Mobile sober up and stop taking the piss, that’s where you should be headed.
http://www.puzzgrid.com also offers up a decent unofficial version of the game and currently offers almost 600 walls of varying difficulties. It will also work fine on your iDevice.