Frenzic for your iPhone
Editor's Note: Yes, you see right. We are also doing iPhone applications now. Thanks to our new writer Brendan Wilhide. This is the first of many iPhone reviews yet to come. I hope you enjoy them. If you want us to review a specific application, please let us know via the contact form.
Puzzle games and the iPhone are an almost perfect match. Puzzle games offer a quick distraction with fun, simple gameplay and iPhone owners love to kill time with a quick gaming session while waiting in line at the bank or riding in a car on a long trip. Yet despite the proliferation of puzzle games for the iPhone, it's becoming more and more difficult to tell the good games from the average ones.
Frenzic is a fast and frantic puzzle game for the iPhone. The game takes only moments to learn how to play and the game boasts some surprising features. Is Frenzic just another puzzle game or is it something more?
Overview
Frenzic is one of the best puzzle games for the iPhone. The game offers a strong feature set and is easy to play because it makes use of the iPhone's intuitive touch screen controls. The object of Frenzic is to gain as many points as possible by placing puzzle pieces into any of six circles on the game board. Frenzic uses green, orange and purple puzzles pieces in six different shapes which form a circle. You gain points for each circle you complete and bonus points and an extra life for each circle you complete using pieces of the same color.
You start the game with four lives. You lose a life each time the timer in the middle winds down. Each move is a race against the timer. If you cannot place a piece on the board, you lose a life when the clock winds down. As you progress through the game, the timer becomes faster and faster until you only have a few moments to place a piece.
You can also earn bonus power-ups every time you clear a circle with pieces of the same color. There are three types of power-ups: double points, the slow timer and the nuke. The double points power-up lets you earn double points until its tiny timer expires, the slow timer slows the game timer by 50% until its tiny timer expires and the nuke clears the entire game board, which is useful if you are stuck with a piece you can't place.
As a bonus, Frenzic makes use of the iPhone's Internet connectivity and location awareness features to give iPhone gamers even more bang for their buck. The game tracks your progress from "newbie" all the way up to "grandmaster" and includes an all-time points scoreboard, statistics for your games and a personal "top 25" scoreboard. Frenzic also uses your iPhone's location awareness tool to show you scores of nearby players, too.
Frenzic features simple sound effects and a very short, repetitive soundtrack, all of which can be turned off from the game's settings menu. Still, the game's simple sounds mostly add to the excitement as you furiously tap away at the game board.
Summary
Originally a Mac game by The Iconfactory, Frenzic debuted on the iPhone in late November, 2008, and you'd swear that the game had always been played on a touch screen. The controls are intuitive and tapping to move pieces is second nature to iPhone gamers.
Frenzic is one of the best games I've played on the iPhone. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a fun and addicting game that they can take with them anywhere.
Pros
- Fast and fun
- Integrated social networking features, like scoreboard
- Location awareness feature: see the scores of players around you
Contras
- Repetitive music (which can be turned off)
This review was written by Brendan Wilhide