Boxes is one of those games that breaks all the rules for me. The game really feels like it’s only half finished. There’s no pause button. If you have to exit the game for any reason other than dying, your position isn’t saved. The graphics are nothing special, though the particles around the boxes are kind of nifty. The swirling background makes me feel like I’m watching Windows media player, and the platforms are pretty much fat lines drawn in a simple paint program. There’s no music, and not even any sound effects. Now I’m not excusing any of these things, because to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t pay for a game that was this lacking. In spite of all this, however, the game is actually fun!

Lots Of Little Platforms

The premise is quite simple. You have an equal number of boxes on the top and bottom of the screen, and you must make pairs of boxes match up by tilting the device to move the boxes left, right, up and down. It seems too simple to be enjoyable, but the developer threw enough in there to make this quite a challenging game. First of all, the game is timed and you only get five lives. Judging by the lack of score I’d say that there is no way to earn extra lives either. After the first couple of levels most of the platforms don’t stand still any more. Some rotate while others slide back and forth. The more you tilt the device the faster the blocks go, and movement is momentum based, so it’s not uncommon to accidentally jump a small gap instead of falling through it. And, once you start having multiple pairs of boxes to match you have to be cognizant of all boxes at all times, because the time passes by quickly. This is one of those games that forces you to figure out how to solve a level right and repeatably, and actually makes it interesting to do so.

While I’m not normally a big fan of this alternative, Boxes does let you play music on your device in place of a soundtrack. I still don’t feel that’s an excusable substitute for not having music native to the game, but at least this is the type of game where just about anything in the background sounds just fine.

Boxes is one of those rare instances where a free game was mostly lacking, but ended up having enough game play to mostly make up for the deficiencies. I’ll be the first to admit that I would not have been happy paying for boxes, since it does feel like a work in progress, but if you can catch it while it’s free, you would be remiss to not give this challenging puzzle game a try.

Final Verdict: Recommended (while it’s free)
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[note: image courtesy of AppShopper]