Quick Look: Twice! for iPhone
My son is 5 years old, and one of his favorite games to play is matching. Personally, I don’t care for it. It’s not that I can’t handle it, because I think I do a pretty good job with it. In fact, it’s fun because it’s one of the few games that he both “gets” rules-wise and is good at. It’s just that I find the game boring, especially if there are a lot of cards to match on the playing field. This mild disdain for the genre pretty much carries over to the electronic world, especially since most developers that implement this type of game don’t do much to make it any different from the physical version. Usually Herocraft is able to take such things and at least make them interesting, even if I still don’t necessarily care for the end results. I’m not so sure they even managed to accomplish that with Twice.
Matched 'Em All
If you didn’t gather by the paragraph above, Twice is the iPhone version of matching. There have certainly been other implementations of matching on the iPhone, but I was keeping my fingers crossed that Herocraft might do something with it to at least intrigue me, if not actually blow me away. Instead, what I ended up with was a variant of matching that while mildly entertaining, doesn’t break new ground in such a way as to capture my attention. Twice has three game modes: sly, agile and smart. In Sly mode you must make matches in as few moves as possible. Each move reduces a turn indicator by one, and when that turn indicator is empty you lose a life. In Agile mode you must make all your matches in a certain amount of time. When the time is up, you lose a life. Finally, smart mode requires you to score the highest amount of points possible. Time doesn’t play a factor in this mode, but your points are determined by how many moves you make, so it’s kind of like an advanced version of Sly.
Playing the game is a simple matter of tapping on two tiles in a row. When tiles match they’ll stay turned over. If you’re feeling ambitious you can really tap on as many tiles in a row as you can get in before they start turning back over, but you need to keep track mentally of the sequence in which you tapped on tiles. I wouldn’t recommend tapping more than two ahead of schedule. Besides having three different modes, the developers were kind enough to not use the standard NxN board layout. In fact, so far every board of each level has been different. A lot of times the layouts actually seem to look like specific objects, which is also pretty cool. There’s even this neat thing where every once in a while a butterfly escapes when you turn a tile over, and while the butterfly is flittering around none of the bad effects take place. So if you’re playing timed mode, for example, you won’t lose any time while the butterfly is out. The sad part is that seems to be about the extent of features that stray from the norm. It keeps the game interesting for a while, but in the end it still feels like “just another matching game”.
While not the best visuals Herocraft has to offer, I do like the look of the game. The jungle theme works well, and there are nice little touches like the butterfly flitting around or the fireworks that shoot off at the end of each level. The sound effects are actually pretty week. The music is decent, but doesn’t seem to fit the theme of the game all that well.
Twice certainly isn’t a bad game, and in fact I’d say it’s probably one of the better matching games I’ve played on my iPod. Unfortunately, as someone who is not a fan of the genre in the first place, I was really hoping the game would do something to ignite that spark of interest in me, and Twice really didn’t do that. If you’re into matching games, I would suggest giving this one a try. You’ll probably like it a lot. If you’ve not tried matching games before, this might be a good place to start. If you’re like me and don’t really care for the genre, this isn’t going to push you over the edge.
Final Verdict: On The Fence
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