Quick Review – Countdown

Jump right into Countdown by Tibfib (available for free on the App Catalog) and you’re immediately confronted with what might appear to be a random and confusing wall of numbers. Luckily for us, the adventurous App Catalog perusers, the developer saw it fit to include a link to the “How to Play” page at the very top of the screen when you first fire up the application. It is presented plain as day what the object of the game is: “to set all squares to ’0′. Once you do, you win!”. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, kind of, but not exactly.

To me, Countdown is somewhat of a cross between the classic Lights Out game and less directly, Minesweeper. You tap on any given number on the grid and it, along with the numbers directly to the left, right, top and bottom, decrease by 1 until you hit 0. Then if you tap it again, it cycles back to 3. Again, the premise of the game is simple enough, but those of you who’ve ever played either game I compare it to will realize that it can sometimes be extremely difficult. After reading all the information on the “help” page, I went back and tackled the game again, this time not randomly tapping at the screen, but armed with the knowledge of how to play the game properly. This time, I was still at a loss on how to get all these numbers to somehow reach 0. I was almost ready to declare it a fact that I’d never solve a single puzzle. But after a few retries, suddenly it just “clicked” and I was seemingly flying through the puzzles as the counter at the top right of the screen kept me reminded of how many I’d completed. It was a really cool feeling actually, and I was enjoying myself quite a bit. Granted this was only on the very first difficulty level out of five, but I was enjoying myself nonetheless.

The look and feel of the game is pretty cut and dry. First you have the difficulty selection page, then you have a wall of numbers. Nothing particularly jumps out at you ever and you might argue that nothing ever needs to based on the simplicity of the gameplay, but it would be nice if the app had some flavor to distinguish it from others. Even a more vibrant color scheme would have helped, if not custom graphics and animations. The one little extra that you get with this game is the ability to create your own puzzles and send them to the development team, which they promise to include in future updates.

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