Eager Beaver Review

Beavers have become quite ingenious in recent years if Eager Beaver is anything to go by. With increasingly dangerous floods approaching, it's down to Edgar the beaver to create sufficiently strong dams to withstand the force. So begins an adventure of Tetris style proportions.

Edgar the beaver has come up with an easier method than lifting the pieces of wood himself. Eager Beaver offers a machine that spins objects around above the water, thus making it simple to piece them together once they drop to the riverbed. It's a neat idea and no doubt immensely practical for the beaver folks. It also provides fun mechanics for the player.

Across the 70 levels, players must piece together these pieces to create a suitable dam. In each level, players are restricted to using a set number of pieces with the fewer pieces used to solve the stage, the better. Some objects are obviously useful such as long, straight pieces. Others require some work such as two intersecting pieces that can be connected together.

In each case, the blocks drop from a height which can affect their trajectory. They can be dropped at an angle for a certain advantage or disadvantage, making timing crucial to success. The stream of water can also affect how they land and that's without taking into account the obstacles that are left in the river. These can range from fish to mines or barrels that get in the way and must be circumvented.

Sticking to the traditional puzzle mechanics, Eager Beaver rewards players up to 3 stars according to how well the level is completed. These then lead to unlocking further stages.

It's a little cumbersome placing one finger on a shape to move the machine along the riverbed, blocking the player from seeing what's going on but, other than that, Eager Beaver ticks all the relevant physics puzzler boxes. It's not quite as interesting a concept as we usually see from Chillingo but the cute appearance of Edgar goes a long way to rectifying things.