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Shades: A Simple Puzzle Game - UOVO

Shades: A Simple Puzzle Game iPhone Game Review.

If you’re good with colors, and you’re looking for a nice challenge this week, then Shades is the game for you. The rules are easy, the design is simple, the controls are intuitive…pretty much everything about this game screams user-friendly. But Shades is not quite what I would call an easy game. It feels like a complete brain work-out. One you can enjoy this week totally free of charge.

How it works

I loved it that Shades is a straight-forward game. No complicated controls, numerous quests, or buttons all over the screen. In a couple of seconds, you find out all you need to know from a simple, and concise tutorial. Your goal is to make rows with blocks of the same color. When you stack blocks of the same color, the result is a darker colored block. And when you feel the pace is too slow for you, just swipe down to make the blocks fall faster. That’s all. The rest is up to you.

Know your colors

But, as you’ll realize soon after starting to play, Shades is a bit more complicated than your regular Tetris game. First of all, you should really know colors. Take blue, for example: there’s Royal, Cobalt, Egyptian, Sapphire, Carolina, Tiffany, Navy blue, and the list goes on, and on. Fortunately, this game doesn’t include all the shades a color can have, but you should know how to make the difference between a bit more than dark, and regular blue.

Stack them right

Once you get your colors straight, and start making the difference between all sorts of different shades, you need to keep a look on the big picture at all times. Ideally, you should always stack same colored blocks on top of each other. Or, at least, try to obtain a layered panel of shades, where the lightest shade is at the top, and the darkest at the bottom. But, obviously, you won’t always get the block you want to create the darker shade that you need. So, getting a perfectly organized set of blocks probably won’t always work. But, you’ll be amazed to see how fast you can develop a Plan B, C, and D to somehow, eventually, make it work.

50 shades of grey...and pink, and yellow, and blue, and more!

And that’s the beauty of Shades: it puts your mind at work. You also earn points, and clear levels, as you play the game. But Shades, just like the classic Tetris, is an arcade game. Clearing levels only brings you more points. Once the game is over, you restart it from level 1. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easier, and monotonous, because now you can recognize the shades of blue faster, for example. Because you never play the game using the same color two times in a row. If this game is blue-shaded, so to speak, your main color the next game can be green, red, yellow, who knows? But it will definitely not be blue again.

A must-have this week

All in all, I really, really enjoyed playing Shades. I love the simple graphics, the idea behind the game, the fact that you can choose a difficulty level…pretty much everything. The screen flips a bit when you tap on it to set the location of the block, and that looks pretty much like the only flaw. But even that I think is intended to make the direction clearer, rather than being a bug in the game.

So, all things considered, my answer is yes! I will definitely continue playing Shades. And I’m glad it’s App of the Week in the App Store, and can now be download totally free of charge.

Screenshots

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Shades: A Simple Puzzle Game icon

Shades: A Simple Puzzle Game
Developer: UOVO
Category: Games
Version reviewed: 1.1.1
Price: Free

Our Rating

4.5 / 5

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iPhone Review Posted in App Reviews, Games & Entertainment

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