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Review

Buy Linez (Don’t Do It)

by RevStu (November 7th, 2010 at 3:52 pm)

Because it’s temporarily free, of course. Do you see what we did there?

The game that Linez is a variant on exists in several guises on the App Store, but this is as good as any of them and it’s currently the free-est. The instructions are about as helpful as giving a man on fire a hammer, so we’ll have a quick run-through below, but the short version is that it’s well worth a download. I mean, obviously. Would we waste your time?

You start off with a few coloured blocks on the playfield, and three more at the bottom. You tap one of the ones on the playfield, then tap a new square on the grid to move it to. There must be a clear path to the target square (comprising horizontal and vertical movement, but not diagonal, and it doesn’t have to be in a single straight line), and once you’ve made a legal move the three blocks at the bottom will be fired randomly onto the grid.

Your job is to get four or more blocks into a line (horizontal, vertical OR diagonal), at which point they disappear and you get a free move. Keep making lines and you keep getting free moves, fail to make a line and you get another three blocks dumped on the grid. A simple glance at the arithmetic will tell you that you’re pretty quickly going to run out of space unless you plan your moves very carefully.

Eventually, of course, you’ll lose, because the numbers are against you and you might get a block dropped in a square you really needed to be able to move through. You can move it, but it’s like struggling in quicksand – you just get yourself in deeper trouble, because every time you shift a block out of the way you get three more to deal with. One of which might get dropped in the square you just cleared, which will make you cry. (Our top, which is to say only, tip so far is to try to make lines along the edges of the grid as much as possible rather than in the middle. )

But it’s fun to see how long you can resist the blizzard for by making every move count, and Linez definitely isn’t one of those matching games that go on for hours and hours at a time – it’s perfect bus-queue material, and will happily resume a session if you have to quit out to actually, y’know, get on the bus. And at a teeny 2.8 MB, it’s not asking for much.

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