REVIEW: LYNE


Title	LYNE
Developer	Thomas Bowker
Publisher	Thomas Bowker
Release Date	Mar 17, 2014
Genre	Puzzle, Casual, Indie
Platform	PC, Mac, Linux, Mobile
Age Rating	N/A
Official Website

I was going to try to come up with a witty intro for my first review, but then I decided to save that for a more deserving game. What could the game possibly be about, you ask? Well…lines…it’s an entire game all about lines. The entire premise of the game is to connect together all of the shapes, starting and ending with the shapes that have the white center in them. So, I guess the main questions would be whether this game bored me to tears, or if it made me want to jump for joy at how amazingly put together it was.

The gameplay is simple. You click with your mouse (or with your fingers, depending on the OS) and drag the line, moving the line in both 90- and 45-degree angles in order to get through each shape at least once. There is, however, one exception. There are these certain blocks, shaped like octagons, that have different numbers of diamonds on them. The number of diamonds determines how many times you need to go through that block. Sounds simple, right? Wrong! The challenge comes when you realize that you cannot go through the same block twice, nor the same line. You also have to make sure that you go through the octagon every single time that it asks you too, or else the shapes or diamonds that you didn’t go though will flash red. This makes the later puzzles especially difficult, and multiplies the frustration factor tenfold! Once you’ve finished going through all of the blocks, the game moves on to the next section. Completing 25 sections will move you on to the next level of the game. I played LYNE for almost five hours, went through over 300 levels, and still couldn’t get to the end. To make matters worse, there are 50 newly-generated levels daily, so you’ll more than likely never run out of levels in the game.

Now, for me, the music is really hard to explain. Other than the main menu, unless you can call fingers moving over wine glasses in really high octaves music, the game has none. Heck, even on the title screen you can barely hear the music without having headphones on, which I do NOT recommend, by the way. The reason for this is because of the sound effects. Don’t believe me? Here’s a small sample of the effects just to give you an idea of what you have to sit through throughout this entire game. So, if you’re trying to play this with any kind of noise, I suggest you find yourself an iPod or MP3 player to listen to. I would also suggest some soft music. Trust me, this game is so frustrating that you’ll definitely need some soft music to calm you down after playing for even the shortest amount of time.

At least the graphics are pleasing. Whenever you click on a shape, it rotates and lights up as you drag a bigger, more transparent copy of the shape along the line to the next one. Whenever you finish a line, they all glow and light up white. The animation is smooth, and the game really isn’t very demanding, meaning that it doesn’t take much for a computer to run it. After a while, though, the graphics do seem to get old and repetitive. The only new things that really get added in are new shapes, and, for me, that just isn’t very impressive.

To me, this game seemed like it would be good, but it just didn’t deliver. The game was fun at first, but it very quickly became very dull and boring. I have to hand it to Thomas Bowker, though. All of these puzzles were very challenging and slowly got harder as the levels progressed. The game was good, in a sense, but it could have been a lot better. They could have added much more to the game just to make it interesting, even something as small as maybe the shapes exploding when you’ve got the right combination would’ve made the game slightly more interesting. Honestly, this game isn’t even fun enough to put up with the sheer frustration that it causes. It’s $3 worth of mind-numbing, boring and hair-pulling puzzles. If you like that sort of thing, then this game is for you, but I for one am not a fan of this game, and that, my dear friends, really is the bottom LYNE.