Noodles! review: a complex puzzle game (with absolutely no heptagons)

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When you are relaxing with a nice, simple puzzle game, do you prefer it to be mindless and easy, or are you the type of gamer that likes things that are hard to solve?

Noodles! is a simple puzzle game with a nice, solid challenge. It isn’t so hard that you give up, but it is hard enough to make you feel smart when you finally solve a puzzle. Check out our game review of Noodles! below.

Concept

Players must join all pipes together by rotating their position until every portion is connected. Tap a pipe to rotate it. Many of them can be connected in multiple ways, making it difficult to determine their correct position easily.

Design

The game follows the minimalistic ideology of simple lines, very few colors (only two per screen) and a flat look. There is no music, but each time you rotate a pipe, a chime plays. If you rotate the same pipe more than once, it will chime different notes.

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Gameplay

The goal of the game is to connect all pipes together, which doesn’t seem that hard when there are only about a dozen interlocking pieces. However, when you have about four dozen interlocking pieces, it gets much harder to follow the correct path.

Some pipes have multiple connectors. Like the “T” pipe, which can be rotated to connect to three different pipes in any direction. There are also end caps, which stop the pipe’s path. They all need to be used, but you don’t always want to stop a pipe’s pathway.

There are two different types of puzzles within this game. One is based on pipes alone, as described above. The other is tile-based.

The tile-based game is made up of a grid with hexagons (the developers want us to know that no heptagons were ever used in this game because heptagons suck). Similar to the pipes, these tiles are rotated whenever you tap them. Tiles can have multiple connectors and some are end caps. The main difference between the two puzzles is that the tiles have more rotation options than the pipes.

The puzzles are grouped into grids of five-by-five or seven-by-seven. The “Getting Started” round has a combination of all puzzles in all sizes.

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The Good

This game really stretches my brain muscles. Every time I think I’ve managed to connect all of the paths, there is one pipe loose. Every time I think the puzzle is unsolvable, I rotate a pipe and make them all connect. It is very exciting, but also very challenging.

The Bad

I could use some sort of hint system. I keep getting stuck on puzzles with no way of knowing how to solve them.

Value

Noodles! costs $1.99 for thousands of puzzles with no additional in-app purchase. The replay value is high. Players score more for completing the puzzles in fewer moves. So, you will want to go back to earlier levels if you didn’t get five diamonds the first time.

Conclusion

I really like this game. It is challenging enough to really make me work for my reward. However, it is not so tough that you will just give up and quit. If you like Pipe Mania style mini games, this is very similar, but has a few additional features to make it interesting. This game is available on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Download it in the App Store today.

Related Apps

Lyne has a similar type of game mechanic. If you are a fan of minimalist puzzles, try Hook.

What do you think of this puzzle game? Let us know in the comments below.