Please Fix The Road

Looks fairly decent, seamless transitions between levels are nice feature, I appreciate the soundtrack too. Unfortunately, all this praise has little to do with the actual game, which manages to be frustrating and boring at the same time. The game requires you to re-arrange tiles, which need to be used in the order they're given, so the subject can follow its line to the goal. You can 'ruin' other untravelled roads along the way. Keep that in mind, it will be important later. The game has pacing issues (but not difficulty). It introduces ways to re-arrange tiles in quick succession, but doesn't explore these new features, leading to confusion about what certain methods did after enough levels have passed. The hint system doesn't give hints, it just does the various steps needed to solve the puzzle. That's not a hint, that making the teacher do your homework for you. A few puzzles later the game doesn't hold to its own rules, where according to the travel-line I managed to reach the goal, but the game would not let me proceed. This is where I realized it's not actually a puzzle-game, it's a point-and-click-adventure. You either follow the exact steps laid out by the developer, or you get stuck. No opportunity to be more clever, find ways to take fewer steps or outwit the developer, just follow the carrot. No thanks, a waste of money and time.

As can be seen from the screenshots the artstyle is gorgeous. The levels vary from forests, snow fields, farmlands, tropical settings and more. They are all great looking to the point where it is a pity that you need to destroy part of the landscape to solve the puzzles. The music is chill and nice although I would not call it memorable. The puzzles revolve around making a path from point A to point B for the trucks, cars, boats, cows, dogs or whatever vehicle or animal the game decides to put into the level. Once they reach their destination you can watch them being catapulted out of the level which is a bit unsatisfying after all the fuss to provide them with a safe passage. You have options to bomb (delete) some tiles, put new tiles on the place of already deleted ones or copy tiles from the landscape and use them instead. The catch is that this is done in "Tetris'' fashion - in a lot of cases you cannot delete or place down only a single tile (1x1), but you need to use whatever pattern the game provides you with 1x2, 2x2, the zig zag ones from "Tetris" (you probably know what I am talking about). There is also the matter of elevation - the tiles differ in their elevation and you need to use the ones with the right elevation or a "slope" tile to make the transition between low and high places. It is a solid concept although nothing revolutionary. One technical problem I’ve experienced is that there is no frame limiter and there is no ingame option to cap the frames or at least a Vsync option. This caused my video card to pump out as many frames as it could which resulted in a high GPU load and high GPU temps. I had to go to the card’s control panel and set a limit for that particular game at 60 which resolved the problem. That being said, I am enjoying the game. It is not something never seen before, but you can tell that a lot of effort was put into it.

Nice relaxing puzzle game. Runs well on linux. The only minus is that you can't rotate the landscape, sometimes it's hard to see where you're supposed to put the pieces.

Although it is a familiar concept the graphics are nice albeit difficult to see exactly where you are playing. I gave it a three out of five because I found the UI frustrating to view and get right. There are enough controls to go back and fix things which was great. Bored? Give it a go but you might find yourself back in the same position after a few levels.