Help An Ancient Incan Warrior Escape His Fate In Tomb Slider, Plus Win A Copy
Tomb Slider (full) ($2.99) by Alawar Entertainment, Inc is an addictive, brain twisting puzzle game that will have you playing until your iPhone or iPad runs out of battery power.
You need to help an entrapped Incan warrior escape from hundreds of ancient tombs by moving the rocks that block the exit so that he can reach the surface. He will need your help tomb after tomb, on a long, challenging quest that will take plenty of brain power to solve.
Clearing a path between the warrior and the exit is simple, control wise. Just use a finger to slide the blocks in different directions. Like other puzzle games of this type, horizontal blocks can only move from left to right and vertical blocks can only move up and down. You will have to figure out how to rearrange the stones in each level to create a clear pathway to the opening at the end, a task that is not always easy.
To unlock new areas and get the highest score possible, puzzles must be solved in the quickest amount of time and with the fewest moves. Beating a puzzle within the limits will reward you with three stars, which is a task that usually requires liberal use of the restart button. Stars are used to unlock harder game levels.
The game starts out easy, in the “Peasant” area, where puzzles only take around five to eight steps to solve. As the game progresses, each stage takes several more steps to solve, until the final area, the “Chief,” takes around 20 to 24 steps to clear a path to the exit.
If levels get too difficult, there are hints available. The more stars you get, the more hints you unlock, so beating those last levels may require finishing all of the early levels first.
Tomb Slider features Game Center and OpenFeint integration with 43 achievements to earn, from completing levels to making the fewest possible moves during 30 minutes of gameplay. Some of the achievements are difficult to get, and will keep score hungry players occupied for hours on end.
I’ll be honest. I’m not a huge fan of these kind of puzzles. Spacial rearranging is not my strong point or a particular interest of mine, but I was sufficiently proficient at Tomb Slider, thanks to a difficulty curve that was neither too easy or too hard.
Puzzles were often tough to solve, but not impossible, so I never became frustrated. Although I usually dislike block maneuvering, I found myself engrossed in beating the increasingly difficult puzzles.
I would have liked a quicker access restart button because I used it so often. It’s a two-step process to restart a level, and a lot of puzzle and action games use a single tap restart for maximum speed. I also would have liked a scenery change. All 360 levels in this game feature the same artwork, and while well done, it does get visually repetitive.
Overall, Tomb Slider is an ultra fun puzzle game that’s hard to put down, despite its simple concept. The graphics are great and the puzzles require a lot of thought, making for a great experience that will have you reaching for this game time and time again.
Guess what? We have THREE copies of Tomb Slider to give away to our lucky readers. For your chance to win, just leave a comment on this post, and make sure to include a valid email address so that we can contact you if you win. This giveaway will end on Monday, August 8, at 5 p.m. PDT.
