The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Whenever I’m bored, I sometimes boot up the ol’ appshopper and see if there’s anything free out there that looks interesting. A recent thing I grabbed was something called Doodle Fit. Now, for no good reason, I really fell in love with LetsTans, a simple, free Tangram game. It didn’t require much thought, but was just enough to not be completely boring: a great thing to do while listening to a podcast. This game, in its description, reminded me of it. I’d need to fit blocks of different set shapes that I couldn’t rotate into a bigger picture. Fair enough. Sure, it was one of those stupid games trying to cash in on the popularity of Doodle Jump, but it was free, so why not?

Of course, you get what you pay for: it’s not that great.

For one, the interface is kind of awful. Instead of dragging the pieces into place, like a sane game would do on a touch screen, you instead tap to highlight a piece, and then drag your finger around like an analog stick to move a shadow of it into place. Then you let go and it places itself. I really have no idea why the designers would waste the touch screen like that. They have great one-to-one interaction with blocks like this. The iPhone and such is MADE for this shit. It baffles me that they could get it wrong.

I also found that the puzzles themselves did not have a lot of variety. They were just different boxes with some spaces pre-filled in. With Tangrams, it’s fun trying to see what ridiculous thing they are claiming what you’re making is a picture of. In this, they kind of give up on that like 8 puzzles in, where they have a puzzle named “We have no idea” for what it is supposed to be. Good job on that one, developers of Doodle Fit.

Finally, I don’t know what it is about tangrams in general, but they have just the perfect amount of difficulty. You don’t always know the solution immediately, but once you start trying things, you figure it out fast enough. I didn’t find the puzzles in Doodle Fit to have this quality. Either I knew the solution immediately, or it took me FOREVER to solve it. I’d keep trying different organizations, and nothing would even get close. I couldn’t get any clues. I’d just kind of fall flat on my face and get frustrated.

Yeah, I can’t really recommend it. I guess it’s trying to sell puzzle packs, like LetsTans. Granted, I never bought one for LetsTans, because they were really good about putting out little free puzzle updates on a regular basis, but I might see me buying a dollar puzzle pack for LetsTans if I was really bored. I got tired of Doodle Fit before I completed the beginner stages. Not worth your time.