Developer: Gamious
Publisher: Gamious
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Lines – Review
Coloring lines that form images, that’s basically all that Lines makes you do. You’ll have to make sure to color the longest line though, which isn’t as easy as it may sound. Put your grey matter to work in this colorful game, you won’t regret it.
Story
The story part of this review is a bit otiose to be honest, as there simply isn’t any story to tell. As the game only consists out of lines and dots, a storyline is hardly necessary anyway, so we didn’t miss one at all.
Graphics
Lines has really simple graphics, but looks attractive nonetheless. Images formed with light grey lines and a white background, or a black one if you wish to change it, are almost all you’ll have to begin with. Once you start playing, the grey lines will become colored, and because the colors are so bright, it really lightens up the game and makes it look quite nice.
Sound
The game is accompanied by piano music that keeps to the background for the most part, but becomes more apparent at crucial moments. There’s a small tune for when you win, and one for when you lose, which brings just that little bit more excitement to an otherwise very simple and straightforward game. The music in between levels or while playing a level is more on the meditative side, so very relaxing indeed.
Gameplay
Lines could be called a puzzle game, be it one where there are no pieces, but where your logic thinking will definitely be tested nonetheless. The goal of the game is simple. In each level, you are assigned a color that you’ll have to use to fill up the grey lines. Depending on the move you make, you’ll either be able to fill up more or less of the grey lines than your opponent. The one who fills up the most, wins. Once the race for the win starts, you can follow it on the bottom of your screen, which is a handy tool, as the lines are sometimes so bendy that it’s otherwise difficult to see who actually drew the longest line.
The difficulty lies in the fact that the lines usually form images, which means that lines cross and bend, so you’ll have to really think things over if you want to win. Depending on what’s given at the beginning of a level, such as where your opponent will start and where you will start coloring the lines, it can be quite difficult to figure out the best move, but overall we found that it’s not sheer luck that will decide the outcome, but that you can really win almost every level, be it sometimes after putting more thought to it.
There are seven modes that you can play in this game. In ‘Point’, you will have to decide where to start coloring the lines by putting a dot of your color at a strategical place. ‘Eraser’ will allow you to erase one or more points from your opponent(s), which means that they will have less opportunity to color lines. With ‘Rope’, you can make shortcuts by attaching two lines together, which can be handy to get to certain places faster. ‘Knife’ is a handy tool as well, as you can cut through lines with it, stopping your opponent’s progress. Then there’s ‘Mix’, in which you’ll be able to mix all of the above mentioned techniques to get to your goal. You can also choose to play ‘Custom’, in which you can play levels from the workshop, which are levels made by players themselves. Lastly, there is the infinite mode, where you’ll have to keep playing different levels until you lose. To top it all off, there is also a daily challenge, where you’ll have to win the same level a few times over, in order to gain points.
In each of the above mentioned modes, there are quite a number of levels available. You’ll have to unlock several of them still though, by winning the same level of your choosing a few times in a row. Winning a level three times in a row will earn you a bronze medal, five times is silver, ten times is gold. With each medal earned, you’ll unlock another number of levels. This, combined with the workshop levels, makes sure that there is quite a lot of replay value to this game, simple as it may be. Also the fact that every time you start a level over, the begin status is different, keeps things a bit more interesting. Nonetheless, after playing for a while at a time, it might still get a bit repetitive after all.
If you can’t get enough of it, you can also choose to make new levels yourself, to upload into the workshop. You can do this by using the level editor, but it’s probably wise to read the manual first. For us anyway, that proved to be the better option.
Conclusion
Lines is a game that has very simple gameplay, yet with a lot of different modes to choose from and different things to do. The music and graphics are quite basic, but the bright colors make the whole look quite fun, all while putting your grey matter to work. The developers did their best to keep the game from getting repetitive, which they did very well considering the simplicity of the concept. We liked it, we hope you do too.
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