Flux Free: Painting The Line In Space [Review]

The best puzzle games either have a single rule (Tetris: “Make lines.”) or a few basic rules based on things we know innately or intuitively (Where’s My Water?: “Dig holes, water goes down, steam goes up, poison is bad.”).

Flux Free is a new iOS title which falls into the latter category. It’s a shape-matching game built on a few basic concepts like color theory that keep it from becoming obtuse even when all of its mechanics are in play.

That’s not to say that it’s incredibly easy, but you’ll never spend any time trying to remember how anything works. And it’s smart and fun, so that’s good, too.

Your job in Flux Free is to connect like shapes by tracing lines between them on a grid. Sometimes, squares have asteroids in them that you have to go around, but the main difficulty appears when the two triangles you’re supposed to connect aren’t the same color. Shapes can be red, blue, yellow, green, orange, or purple, and in order to connect a blue triangle to a green one, your blue path has to cross a yellow one to make the desired color. It sounds really complicated when I try to type it out, but you can see what’s going on in that screenshot up there.

It feels like you’re drawing a picture as much as solving a puzzle.

So most stages become matters of planning: Which shapes do you connect first, and how do I make sure I can cross that line later if you need to? It’s satisfying once you’ve solved a particularly tricky puzzle, and the game has an added bonus of looking really cool with all the colored lines going everywhere. It feels like you’re drawing a picture as much as solving a puzzle, and some of the ending patterns are surprisingly elegant.

The game comes loaded with 200 free puzzles, and you can unlock 500 with in-app purchases. It has five difficulty levels (read: five increasingly large grid sizes), and the included content alone will keep you busy for a while.

On the downside, the game had a weird glitch in which the line I was tracing would just stop in the box before the shape I was going to, and I had to reset the level to get it to work right. I’m also not sure how playable it is for colorblind people given its reliance on, you know, color, but I can’t really fault it for that.

Game Name: : Flux Free The Good: It’s easy to pick up, provides some interesting challenge, and is just cool to look at. The Bad: Occasional glitch when tracing lines. The Verdict: It’s a fun and satisfying puzzle game with a bunch of pretty colors. Buy from: App Store

[rating=game4]