Puzzle Domino is a puzzle game by 415 Games, available exclusively on the iPhone and iPod Touch via the Apple App Store. Having some similarities to Tetris, you position falling dominoes and try to match 3 numbers them from the screen, with the speed constantly increasing as you advance. I was apprehensive at first, as in my experience most Tetris variants tend to fall short apart from a few notable exceptions such as Columns, and Meteos. So how does this $5.29 puzzler stack up?
Dominoes if you don’t know, aren’t just a pizza company. Back in the olden days when people used to play bored board games, dominoes was a classic tile game. I can’t tell you what the rules are, but that’s not important here. All you need to know is that domino tiles are rectangular in shape and are "double-ended". Each end of the tile has a number between 1 and 6 (depicted as pips like on dice) on it. In Puzzle Domino, random dominoes fall from the top of the screen, and you must decide how to rotate the domino and place it on your current stack. Line up 3 or more numbers in a row (horizontally, vertically, or even diagonally), and these numbers disappear, leaving any dominoes above to drop down into the remaining void. As in other such games, this can lead to a chain reaction if further numbers are matched up. Every so often a wild card appears, which is the spiritial cousin of the "long" 4×1 tetromino. It is a single square only, and can be placed as any of the numbers between 1 and 6. A bomb also appears randomly to help clear up a mess you have created.
Controls are simple and intuitive – tap on the left side of the screen to rotate a tile anti-clockwise, tap on the right to rotate clockwise. Drag a finger left or right to move the tile into position. Then drag your finger down the screen to increase the speed of the falling tile, or flick it downwards to drop it immediately.
This is my first iPhone/iPod Touch game review, and my first impressions of this game were not particularly favourable. However in time I came to realise that I had to completely change my review criteria for such games from the App Store. At $5.29, I cannot and should not have the same expectations as a full priced console game for example. Once I had reset my expectations, I suddenly found myself enjoying this game a lot more.
It is difficult to form any decent strategy while playing this game. There is no "next tile" indicator, and the number of possible dominoes that can be released means that you often end up with a great big pile of mismatched dominoes on your screen. I found it difficult to chain decent combos for the same reason, but perhaps smarter iPhone gamers will succeed where I have failed. What this does mean though is that games do not tend to go on endlessly, which is in keeping with the nature of the mobile gaming platform.
The game music is nothing to write home about, but easy to turn off. There is no option to listen to songs from your iPod during play. A quirk of the game that I never managed to work out was that every so often and without warning, the game changes from white tiles to black tiles. For the purpose of matching and clearing dominoes, these tile sets cannot be mixed, so when you switch onto black tiles you can only match them with other black tiles. The pile of white tiles remains however, and must be built upon. Eventually, and again without warning, all the black tiles disappear and you resume playing with the white tiles. I was a little taken aback by this at first, especially as nothing is mentioned in the tutorial, but it is something that you will get used to.
Closing Comments
Puzzle Domino is a decent puzzle game with a novel take on Tetris-type games. It is easy for anyone to start playing, but takes perseverance to become skilled at. It is a rewarding experience however, and puzzler fans looking for a new challenge should consider this affordable title.
