Tower Bloxx (Mobile)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.2 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jeff Gerstmann
• Reviewed on: 03/09/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Tower Bloxx (Mobile) Review

Tower Bloxx is a deceptively simple puzzle game from Digital Chocolate that offers two key modes of play. The main action is tower building, which you do with one button. Each floor of your tower is brought in by crane, and it sways back and forth until you drop it by pressing the 5 or OK key. Your goal is to build the straightest tower possible. If you misalign your blocks, the tower will start to sway, making it more difficult to properly place blocks. It's a challenge at first, but you quickly settle into a tower-building rhythm, making the action awfully easy.

That tower-building mechanic is offered in a quick game mode, where you just build the biggest tower you can, and the game ends after three missed drops. But the more interesting mode is the build city mode, which combines the tower building with a logic puzzle. The puzzle asks you to cram as many big buildings into a set space as possible. You'll start out only able to build small 10-story buildings, but eventually you'll get 20-, 30-, and 40-story buildings. The catch is that the different towers have different requirements. The blue 10-story ones can be built anywhere, but the 20-story towers can only be placed next to a blue one, and so on. Figuring out how to place as many 40-story buildings on your map as possible takes a little thought, and this gives some more meaning to the tower building, overall. That said, it would have been nice to see the game include multiple levels with more-challenging requirements, as once you get good at building the towers and get a firm grasp on how to properly place your buildings, there's not much else to do but work on getting your population up. There's an online scoreboard for both the city and the quick play mode, so if you're interested in some competition, you'll find a reason to go back and make your towers better and better, though we ran into a few problems getting the high-score server to respond.

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