Burn the Rope Review

iOS gamers tend to love casual games, and no matter how crazy the graphics and special effects get, I have a feeling that they will always be popular. As cool as the crazy effects are, people really just want to hurl silly bird balls at poorly constructed buildings and cut shapes in perfect bits. Burn the Rope is Big Blue Bubble's latest foray into the casual gaming world, and it has quite a bit of competition this holiday season.

The basic concept of Burn the Rope is to burn up as much of the rope shapes as you can without the flame dying, but the meat of the game is all about the twisting and turning. After touching where on the rope you want to start the flame, you must rotate your device to continue the burn because the flames only go up. The trick is that the levels get more and more complicated, with multiple paths for the flames to go and different colored rope to match with flame types. If you don't plan carefully, you'll burn away the path that your flame has to take, dooming you to restart the level.

Conceptually, Burn the Rope sounds fairly fun, but it does get fairly tedious as the game goes on. Having to turn your iPhone around constantly while worrying about different colored flames and hard to control offshoot flames just wore me down after a few levels. Casual gaming for me should require a little bit of thought, but a whole lot less effort than Burn the Rope forces you to exert. As original as the game is, it leaves me longing for something simpler, something with more angry birds.