Review: Ancient Frog

3D gaming is skyrocketing on webOS and we’ve seen them in all different flavors:  racing, adventure, platformers and so forth.  One genre that hasn’t seen a lot of titles is puzzle games.  Even the most trivial puzzle game can offer deep thoughts within a simple shell.  One such game is Ancient Frog.

Ancient Frog is developed by Ancient Workshop and it’s a game that offers an intuitive and fun way to interact and solve challenging puzzles with tropical frogs. Hit the link to learn more!

Many users will notice the graphics and attention to detail. It’s a rain forest design with 6 species of frogs sitting on top of a tropical leaf with beads of water strategically placed. To enhance the rain forest feel are some lighting effects that give a comfortable ‘living’ atmosphere and a gentle soundtrack of tropical rain forest sounds.

The main goal of the game is to navigate your frog to a tasty prize. The frog’s movement is limited by the water drops that mark where the frog can step, but it can only move within its physical limitations. The frog is pretty flexible, but it’s not about to do some gymnastics to make it easier for you. The game looks fairly simple, but as the player moves forward the puzzles get more challenging. Luckily you are not working against a timer so you can take as much time as you need, but there is a counter for how many moves are made and it displays above the ‘par’ number that is displayed as a flower. As you move past par the flower will begin to lose petals; however, you have an unlimited number of Undo’s to correct your mistakes.  Swipe from right to left on the screen to undo. You also have the option to redo moves by swiping left to right.

The game has an animated tutorial that will explain all the tools you will need to play. Tapping the flower in the upper right will display a menu of sorts, and by that I mean a limited menu with no features or switches except for the option to abandon, restart or continue your game. When you’re in the ‘menu’ page, and you’ve abandoned your puzzle, you will be presented with a lawn full of flower pods. Each of these pods represents a level you completed or will complete. Completed pods will be in full bloom while other pods are not. Yellow flowers indicate levels you scored par on, red flowers indicate levels you can do better on. Tapping the bloomed flowers will display general information about that level; puzzle number, difficulty and a comparison with how many moves made versus the record number. You can replay a level at any time or skip forward to a higher level you haven’t reached yet, but the puzzles are not as easy as they seem. If you need help to solve the puzzle, you can tap the question mark icon in the top left for visual assistance.

This game is very enjoyable, but I found a few things that could have been added in to the game. First off, there is the number of puzzles; 100 puzzles is a lot, but it wont last forever. If users were able to submit their own puzzles it would definitely take the challenge to new levels. The game can also use more competition where the user is timed to complete the puzzle, and the score is recorded to an online leader board. I understand that the game allows users to play at their own pace, but the replay value could be improved with these additions.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t have any options (e.g. sound effects) to customize. It’s almost like listening to a white noise box – ‘The Rain Forest Edition’. This may be enjoyable to some, but not everyone will dig it and they will discover that the sound effects cannot be muted. There maybe a band-aid solution, but band-aids don’t stick on everybody. So, hopefully the author will consider these feature requests and possibly implement them into future updates.

Overall, I really like this game. I caught myself playing it for a while and surprisingly it was a very comfortable and enjoyable experience. The attention to detail is excellent and the animated atmosphere, sounds and frogs add a lot of charm to the game. In my opinion the game could use some player competition, leader boards and timed records; however, if you’re looking for something easy to get started with and want to take your time, then I recommend that you check out this game.

If you’re interested in this game, then click here to buy & download it to your webOS device (Palm Pre only, sorry Pixi owners).