Cogs

Published by Chillingo, Cogs is an innovative, logic-based puzzle game from the guys and gals over at Lazy 8 Studios. Through the simple motion of sliding tiles with various metal cogs attached, the game sees you the player building a variety of mechanical machines and crafts. The aim of the game is to get all the metal cogs turning on the playing board, achieved by ensuring each cog touches the next one beside it all the while keeping your overall number of moves to a minimum. What makes Cogs different than your normal tile-sliding puzzler however is the playing board. It’s not flat. Using two fingers, and adapted for multi-touch, the board is rotatable giving you a birds eye view of where best to make your next move.

Your initial 59p (99 cents, those crazy British - ed.) will get you, I have to say .. more of a demo-type experience. This version of Cogs includes just 10 levels, and provides about 30-40 minutes of gameplay. Cogs plays out in two modes; Inventor mode and Challenge mode. In Inventor mode you’re giving a brief of what the outcome should be after completing each level. Challenge mode however is a little more pressured, seeing a 30 second time limit introduced, and just 10 moves to find each solution to each puzzle! Playing through 50 levels of coglicious slidification, your skills will be put to the test across 3 specific categories. Whether you managed to find the solution, the time it took you to find that individual solution and how many moves in total it took you to find the solution. Each of these in-game aspects are then marked out of 3 stars.

The game has a old world look to it, with the theme of wood and brass running throughout. Playing the game is fairly simple. Using your fingers you slide and move tiles around the board. The aim is to make all the cogs on the tiles touch, in sequence with the start and end cog causing the mechanics of the machine you've built to spring into action, signaling level completion. I have to say that having spent a fair amount of time with the game (even before it was released). Cogs ran like butter on my 3GS, with in-game animations adding to an already admittedly addictive puzzle experience.

Overall, I found Cogs to be a fun little puzzler which definitely uses multi-touch and the iPhone's screen to the best of its ability. If I had to sum up the game, I'd class it as a good fun-filled time passer, my only little caveat being that because of the true repetitive nature of the puzzles within Cogs, the game didn't seem to have as much replay value as I probably was expecting from it, or would have liked it to of had.

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