Star Paint

By Bonnie Eisenman on November 6th, 2009
Our Rating: :: OKAY
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad

Star Paint is a well-implemented version of the classic “untangle” concept. However, there’s nothing to make it stand out from the crowd, and the absence of auto-save alone is enough to make me hesitate before recommending it.

At its heart, Star Paint is a simple untangle-it game. It’s a solid title and bundled in a nice theme, and OpenFeint integration is always a plus. However, it does lack a few important functions (like a resume feature), the instructions aren’t clear, and there’s not much variety to spice things up. Star Paint is a good game nevertheless, but I’d like to see some updates.

As you may have guessed by the title, Star Paint is star-themed; each stage consists of a number of stars connected by a tangled mess of lines, constellation-style. Your job is to untangle them by dragging the stars around the screen. It starts out simply, but by the time you’re playing hard mode you’ll have to sink quite a bit of time into each puzzle. Puzzles are randomly generated, so you never “run out,” per se, but I did think that they got repetitive—once you develop a strategy, it can be applied to pretty much every puzzle. Once you complete a puzzle, you’re taken to the next one. While there are three modes (Normal, Medium, and Hard), all are essentially Endless modes with varying levels of complexity. Supposedly there’s a time limit, but I moved quickly enough that it wasn’t an issue.

There’s also a Constellation mode, which, as far as I can tell, just lets you play with the stars and, if you know how, rearrange them into the shapes of famous constellations like Aries. I didn’t really see a point to Constellation mode, but I might have missed something. The instructions don’t cover that mode at all, and are rather sparse for the main game as well.

One more thing about Star Paint: OpenFeint integration! StarPaint alerts you to in-game achievements as you play, and Medium and Hard modes are unlocked by completing two basic achievements.

The game itself works, but integration is lacking. There’s no “resume” function, and closing the app means that you lose all of your progress. This might have something to do with the randomly generated maps, but users will doubtlessly be irked to see their high scores cut off mid-game just because they went to check their mail and the developers didn’t feel like including an auto-save function. The presentation could also use some work; the music annoyed me and the graphics, while adequate, aren’t stellar either.

Star Paint is a decent game. Unfortunately, it’s not much more than a simple distraction built on a simple premise, and without any new twists to make it interesting, there are countless clones that offer similar gameplay. Don’t get me wrong: if you like untangle-games, this is a good implementation of a classic, though auto-save really needs to be present. But more importantly, the novelty soon wore off and I was stuck with randomly-generated maps that still managed to feel repetitive.

Star Paint

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Buy Now: $0.99

Our Rating: :: OKAY
Read Our Full Review >>

Released: 2009-10-21 :: Category: Games