Review Shooter: Gem Spinner
I personally don’t believe that mobile/smart phone gaming is the future of the industry, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t have its place. Right now, the market caters towards what I like to call burst gaming. Living in New York City, I often find myself on one of our fancy buses or trains for periods of time, and its the perfect opportunity to whip out my phone and play a game for 5-20 minutes and be satisfied.
One such game that has kept my attention for the past several weeks is Gem Spinner. Created by the fine folks over at Tiny Bite Games, Gem Spinner offers a somewhat interesting twist on the standard match the gem puzzle games. The best way to describe this game would be an odd step-child of Tetris and Bejeweled. You take the core fundamentals of matching liked color gems to create combos and clear the board, but you add in a board that is made up of several varying sized pieces, which can be moved actively throughout the course of the game to better line-up matches and blocks. Of course much like Tetris, this pieces must fit together and offer no overlap so it adds a fun little wrinkle to this game.
One of the many types of pieces you will encounter.
The game offers up 35 levels of play, but offers 4 varying difficult levels, which increases the number of matches needed and cuts down the time you have in between moves. Offering a nice level of challenge as you progress. The stages all take on various looks with several different block configuration, and using them to their full potential is only one of the challenges you face.
The game is fairly simple in its looks. The backgrounds are pretty much just marble gray of sorts. And the gems while colorful really lack any type of life, but honestly who cares?
Recommendation: Buy It– At the end of the day, the game is available for 2 bucks on the Android Market (played it on the Droid Incredible) and 3 bucks on the iTunes stores. It is a fun little diversion, which I don’t think you would get bored of quickly. And you can always return to stages you cleared to improve your high score. Perhaps some form of leaderboard would have helped compete with friends, but a minor exclusion.
