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Rolo (iPhone)

Review by Ben Briggs, January 09, 2009

iPhone integration (About)
  • Save state: Yes
  • iPod music: No
  • Status bar: No
  • Version: 1.2
  • Price as reviewed: £1.19
  • by Luga

Unfortunately, Rolo is not an application in which you are in the land of sweet things, gorging yourself on delicious little miniature chocolate of the same name. It's actually a lot better than that, because you can't taste virtual chocolate. Rolo is actually a fun game for iPhone, in which you must slide those cute little characters to match the diagram in the top left corner.

Control is exclusively touch based. Sliding your finger along a row/column (left/right, up/down) shifts the position of every Rolo in that row/column. The idea being that when you shift a row one space to the left you get a new Rolo in the column that you will move down one space to complete the level. The puzzles themselves make full use of the sliding interface to create some devious brain teasers, designed to be picked over like a Rubik's Cube. Indeed, there's no distractions like score/time limit onscreen to remove from the gameplay. We feel that time challenges would add a lot more to the game, but we're not complaining.

The presentation in Rolo is very fluid and cartoon like. Rolos will start to get agitated if you spend too long over a puzzle, and are in themselves very colourful. The boards are cleverly designed, and the background never gets in the way of the gameplay. Rolo also makes full use of the Core Animation framework to provide a good menu interface that feels fast and solid. You're also provided with a couple of short music tracks, (one menu, one in game) and a couple of sound effects, both of which can be muted - so it's no big deal once you get bored of them.

There's not much to Rolo, but it's 60 odd challenging puzzles (more to come with updates) make it worth a look for fans of puzzle games. If you're looking for detailed statistic tracking, high scores or unlockable achievements, you won't find them here - Rolo is a good game at a cheap price, with no fanciful extras.

Grade: D, Mediocre

Charming little puzzle game that's short on options, but will keep your mind occupied.

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