Developer: Cipher Prime
Publisher: Cipher Prime, indiePub, Steam
Platform: Windows, OS X, Android, iOS
Fractal – Review
After the award winning Auditorium and Pulse, Cipher Prime comes with yet another great game called Fractal. Fractal is a very vivid, colorful and hard puzzle game which will make you want to rage quit! Some levels can take up to 30 minutes of playing and countless restarts, but when you finally make it, it’s so satisfying!
Story
Fractal is another one of those games without a story; you jump into the game and start solving puzzles. There is no point to solving them, but does any puzzle game really have a story?
Graphics
Fractal has beautiful graphics and a lot of colors which fit together perfectly. The color palette of every level is simply stunning: orange with blue, pink with blue, pink with green and so on. Every hexagon has an outlining depending on the level and the color of the hexagon, each hexagon is also identified by the drawing it has inside. The drawings include a simple hexagon, a lightning bolt, a little clock, an explosion, a triangle and a star. All of these elements combined make it a very fun and entertaining experience.
The graphics have almost no customizing possibility but it’s not really needed. The game is very light weight and doesn’t need a high end computer to run. The only customizing that is possible is a windowed mode, a change of resolution and a graphics quality setting going from fastest to fantastic. Windowed mode seems to have a little bug when it comes to dual screening though, it always starts at the middle of the 2 screens, but you can easily drag the window to your primary screen.
Sound
Fractal has very relaxing music running in the background while you’re playing, it’s almost hypnotizing. It’s amazing that the developers have such a good feeling for music when it comes to their games, every song is carefully selected and adapted to make it fit perfectly with the game you’re playing. The combination of sound effects and music is what takes this game to the next level. The sound effects are nicely picked and fit together perfectly with the relaxing vibe of the game. Even though the music is very relaxing, it would be nice to have an option that disables the in game music so you can play your own in the background.
Gameplay
We’ll start off with the campaign mode. It features 30 levels and the difficulty of them ramps up very quickly! At the beginning of the campaign you’re just clicking everywhere and have no idea what to do, suddenly you’re in the next level and don’t know what happened. By the time you hit level 5, you finally understand that you have to create “blooms”. Blooms are clusters of same-colored hexagons which you have to arrange in a big “bloom”, it takes at least 7 hexagons to create a bloom.
To get through these first few levels, a small tutorial would definitely come in handy so you at least know what you have to do to fill the progress bar of the level.
From level 10 and on the game starts to get difficult, there are multiple colors, special powerups and a limited amount of “pushes” (clicks). To get through these levels, you have to make blooms with a new type of hexagon, one with a triangle inside. When combining these hexagons in a bloom, you get extra pushes to complete your level. There are also powerup hexagons, one makes an explosion and the other one shoots lightning through the corresponding color that is connected to the bloom you just made.
The second game mode is the arcade. It’s a pretty straightforward mode that consists of 3 types of arcade levels. In the first one you have one color on the board and push with one color, so everything is the same color. The goal is to get to the next level without your time running out, your time can be increased by creating blooms with the little clock circles.
The second level almost the same, you have one push color, but two colors on the board, same principle, get to a high level within the time limit! In the third level you play with two push colors and two board colors, so you have to think fast while the clock is counting down!
Last but not least: the puzzle mode! This is the most challenging mode in the game and it will test your patience! You get a very limited amount of pushes and use those to complete your objective. Some require you to clear the board, some require you to cause 3 chain reactions and more. In total there are 60 puzzles. Personally, I played the game for 11 hours and finished the campaign and only 27 puzzles (I am extremely bad at puzzle games). So if you want to complete the whole game, it will take you some time!
Conclusion
Fractal is a very refreshing puzzler to the genre. It’s very beautiful but it has a very hard learning curve. It’s a great game if you have some time to kill and you will keep returning to try and finish those hard puzzles which can take hours to complete!
Fractal - Review,
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