Edge for iPhone Review
What’s Edge all about?
At its heart, Edge for the iPhone and iPod Touch is a puzzle game. You are a cube, flashing brilliantly in several colors, and must find your way from one area of each level to the other. The levels are geometric and made up of cubes the same size as yourself. Along your journey you must collect smaller colored blocks that are scattered around the level.
Your cube is controlled by touching the screen at various spots. The perspective of the game is raised and angled in an isometric fashion, so this can get a little tricky. It takes quite a few tries to learn exactly where you need to touch the screen to achieve the desired effect. Your cube rolls well for the most part but sometimes you’ll end up rolling a little further than you had intended, causing you to fall off the edge of the world, which means you have to restart at the point you were last secure.
It’s all very reminiscent of a classic Nintendo game called Marble Madness, where you had to guide a marble to the end of a geometric puzzle. It’s an age-old formula that, when done well, can be very addicting. Edge captures glimpses of that brilliance and even expands on it in some cases, with the addition of collectables and different levels of completion for each stage in the game. You can earn different rankings, so chasing the best ones will always be a draw, even if there isn’t necessarily any new content at the moment.
Graphics, Audio and Verdict
It would be easy to see a screenshot and write off Edge as a simple, cheap game, but that’s not the case at all. The world of Edge is rendered beautifully, with 3D objects and blocks making up each stage. Your block flashes brilliantly in a spectrum of colors as it makes its way from one end of the world to the other. Sure, there isn’t a whole lot of processing power going into rendering a rather bland 3D world, but the simplistic design brings with it a charm that many games never achieve.
The soundtrack is well done, but there isn’t much worth mentioning here. Your block makes nice little pitter patter sounds as it moves throughout the world, and a pleasant chime rings out when you obtain a new prism, but that’s about it. There is background music but it is a weird mix that doesn’t really compliment the game very well. In a game like this you’d expect to hear some cool techno or retro beats but that just isn’t the case. If any of the developers are reading this, we’d LOVE a hot, fast-paced techno soundtrack option. Now.
Overall, Edge is a game that would be worthy of the downloadable market on consoles, but it’s available for your mobile device, making it that much better. The game was originally $5.99, a steep price these days, but has since been lowered to just $2.99. Still, that’s three times the price of games like Doodle Jump and Angry Birds, but we think you’ll find the price to be worth it, as this is one of the most polished and addicting games on the iPhone app store.
