Kunundrum Review for iOS

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Kunundrum Review for iOS

Written by Colby Sorensen Friday, 09 December 2011 12:00

Kunundrum is the first offering from the newly formed studio Hope This Works Games. Each member of the Hope This Works team has worked on either the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 platforms. Kunundrum is their first effort for iOS. Here's the full review along with an opportunity to win a code for the game.

I have to admit, when I first heard the name Kunundrum I played some mental connect the dots – Quantum Conundrum is the next game from Kim Swift, the lead designer on Portal, so Kunundrum is going to be heavily influenced by Portal, right? It could also just be that because Portal is probably the best puzzle game of this generation I will associate every puzzle game with Portal. Kunundrum is a puzzle game, but the HTW team said they actually drew more on older SNES, PC, and even Amiga games for this puzzler. They’ve created something that is not altogether new or unique, but definitely has solid mechanics, exceptionally crisp visuals, and makes good use of the hardware.

Kunundrum-2 Kunundrum consists of 150 levels. Each level gives you a set of small balls of energy, they are usually four different colored balls, each of which must be moved to its respective goal. The only control mechanic is to touch a ball and swipe in a cardinal direction to send it in that direction. The physics hold true to that good old 1st law of motion we all learned in school – something in motion remains in motion until acted on by another force – usually in this case either hitting a wall or another one of the energy spheres. In most puzzles you have to create a backboard so that a ball stops on its goal rather cruising right on by.

There are a lot of things that Kunundrum does very well for a puzzler, namely in the way it progresses. It rolls out a good variety of puzzle mechanics, most of which are usual suspects, but they are all done very well. You will encounter teleporters, blockades, directional speed ramps, and switches that have to be flipped to activate other obstacles on and off. It never has any extended tutorials, just simple tool-tips and puzzles that teach you the mechanics. The difficulty ramp is also brilliant. It’s hard to balance having puzzles that are difficult enough so that finding the solution is satisfying, but not so hard that you want to bang your head against a wall. I found Kunundrum to be very competent at striking this balance. In the beginning map pack most puzzles only take a matter of seconds, but later puzzles will take significantly more time to solve.

On the iOS app store it’s always quite a task to find a game you’ll actually enjoy. Kunundrum offers enough content to be worth the 99 cents and each of the bite-size puzzles is very high quality. Without a doubt I can recommend Kunundrum to puzzle fanatics.

GoozerNation has four codes available for Kunundrum. If you would like a code, the first four people to leave a comment will get one.