PixlBit

Even if you can never remember what it’s called, you’ve messed with tangram before. Probably in elementary school when it improved your understanding of geometry so extensively that your mind zipped out of your body to an ethereal realm of triangles and squares where you were truly at peace. Or, you used it once, decided it was boring, and stared at the carpet instead. Well, now tangram is back! And attacking!? That’s right, the set of shapes that can be formed to sort-of look like anything you can imagine is the center of the fast-paced, mind-challenging Tangram Attack! that found a way to make those simple shapes into a pretty good game – for a while.

Normally when tangram is involved, the activity is in figuring out how to create an animal, object, or person out of the triangles, square, and parallelogram that make up the provided shapes. Tangram Attack! flips this whole concept around and asks you to slice up the already-made picture into the shapes it’s made out of. The trick is that the lines delineating the shapes are mostly unseen, so you have to deduce how the shapes came together to form a given image and slice it apart into its pieces with the stylus.

Confused? As an example, you’ll be shown an angular picture of a running man, and you have to make cuts through the running man to lop off the different pieces one at a time. You can keep track of what pieces are remaining up on the top screen that shows you what’s left from the reliable set of tangram shapes. There’s generally only one way that each picture can be made, and so only one way you can break it back apart, which makes it a challenge.

You get up to speed pretty quickly in the required “Academy” mode where it starts you off with most shapes colored differently, so there’s little doubt of where to slice. As you advance to earn belts (as in martial arts), fewer and fewer of the shapes are given different colors until they are eventually all just one giant geometrical thing that you have to carve up. Each of the modes outside of the Academy mode uses this top-level difficulty, so forcing you to nearly complete all of the lessons before moving on was a good design choice.Some of the different modes have have a time limit, but not all. You earn scores depending on the number of mistakes you make and how fast you go, depending on the mode you’re in. There are also scoring multipliers that pile up as you solve puzzles without mistakes, giving you a way to really work up some high scores as you get better and better, or at least until you memorize most of the puzzles and quit.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that there are only so many pictures you can make out of a set of tangram shapes that would work in this game, but after busting through the academy and doing the other modes a little, you’ll have a good chunk of the puzzles memorized. This makes the post-tutorial levels start to feel a little pointless, unless you’re up for a trial of your memorization abilities. There is no further incentive to keep playing other than high scores, so once you’ve seen it all, it’s you versus the score and nothing else. Well, you can also level up by gaining experience and prestige levels, just like in Call of Duty, but I could find no payoff from doing this and it seemed painfully slow.Up until the point when you start to know all the puzzles fairly well, the challenge is pretty enjoyable from both mind-tingling and reaction time angles. The only real detraction is that sometimes your swipes don’t register quite right and you’ll get flagged with an error when really you were spot-on. The touch-screen detection normally doesn’t do you wrong, but when it does it can be particularly frustrating since it seems to always foul up when you are working up a huge score multiplier. There are also a few situations where there can be more than one shape combination possible, and in those cases you’re left guessing which way the makers picked and when you guess wrong, you feel cheated.

I’ll give Tangram Attack! a lot of credit for taking a crusty old game and making it interesting. I liked it for a while but sadly there is no reason to play for very long since you’ll eventually know exactly what to do on each puzzle when they pop up. Even if there were more pictures to break apart, I’m not sure that would make it any more engaging since they’re all about the same difficulty and there’s nothing new to uncover along the way. Even though the enjoyment wears out fairly quickly, at least this version of tangram is a lot more fun than staring at the carpet.