The Jolly Gamesman and His Many Toys
Implode! for the iPhone & iPod Touch
Blowing shit up is fun. Thankfully, casual games involving physics and destruction seem to have a healthy home on the App Store, and I welcome them with palms wide open.
My favorite of the genre right now is Implode! I applaud the developer for not wasting time with a plot or characters, and just letting the player get with the goods. Each of the 140 levels in Implode! presents a chalk drawing of a 2-D building. Your goal is to topple the building so that the rubble falls under a certain height, indicated by a dashed line drawn across the lower third of the screen. At times, on different maps, other buildings or obstacles will be placed to the left or right of the structure you are tasked to down. These items represent things that your demolition cannot touch in order to compete the level.
At your disposal are a range of bombs, ranging from basic bundles of dynamite and barrels of black powder, to more advanced timed explosives and directional blasts. Using these many explosives in conjunction adds a puzzle element to each level. Trying to use them as sparingly as possible to get a score bonus, while at the same time making sure you can topple the building as low as you can, will keep on bringing you back again and again.
I don’t know if my mutant power is the ability to quickly assess the structural integrity of a building on a schematic, but there was very little challenge for me to bring down a building with one hastily placed bomb. Granted, on my first pass i didn’t achieve an A+ score, but there were plenty of B’s.
While the graphics aren’t amazing and the sounds are not memorable, the 140 schematics in total add a lot of replay value to the title, as you have never truly completed the task until you can achieve an A+ score. Also, as I mentioned earlier, blowing shit up is fun.
~The Fine Print~
$1.99 / A lite version is also available.
In a just released update, the creators let loose a fresh batch of maps for us to crumble.
