Rescue Pine Review

There aren't many genres in the App Store that are as crowded as the physics puzzle genre. No matter what kind of game you want, it exists in the App Store.

Rescue Pine lies squarely in the "remove something to cause an action" sub-genre. The game revolves you reuniting Porcupa, the father porcupine, with Pine, the son, before pine hits the ground. The story, which the game never really gets into, is that Pine keeps getting stuck way up in the trees and needs help from his doting father.

The game is set up to where Pine is usually trapped in some collection of tree-like blocks, and Porcupa is somewhere on the other side of the screen. To win, you have to select blocks (trees) to disappear in such a way that Pine land on top of Porcupa. If Pine hits the ground, even from the smallest height, you lose the level.

While the puzzles are all fairly challenging, there really isn't much different from one level to another. I'm not trying to say that the levels all look the same, I'm just saying that there is no real diversity in level design across the game. The game offers no powerups, no jump platforms, and most disturbing of all, very few of the blocks seem to adhere to the rules of gravity. For example, brown logs and some blocks all fall like they should on Earth, but the green blocks are all static, as if they are somehow parts of invisible trees.

As far as physics puzzles go, Rescue Pine is a good, but unspectacular entry into the genre. It is as bright and happy as it should be, but there really isn't enough going on to warrant "must buy" status.