By Ned Jordan
The Lost Shapes is a shape-tracing, tile-based puzzle game with shades of
Tetris. Random tiles drop into a queue on the left side of the screen and you
must place the next tile in line onto the grid overlaying the game board, or
swap it with a tile that is already sitting on the board. Each tile has one or
more lines that start on one edge of the tile and end on another, and your goal
is to place the tiles so that the edges with lines align with the lines on the
edges of adjacent tiles and eventually form a closed shape. When a shape is
formed, the tiles that form the edge of the shape disappear (unless there are
multiple lines on a tile, in which case just the line that helped build the
shape disappears) and you're given points based on the size and shape of the
square. Things are further complicated by rocks which block spaces on the game
board and tiles that also contain a symbol such as a star or a moon. If more
than one tile with a symbol is used along the edge of a shape, all of the
symbols must match or the shape won't be considered closed. Play continues until
the tile queue becomes completely full.
An alternate puzzle mode places a glowing shape on the game board for you to
match. If you match the shape, it and the tiles disappear and a new shape
appears. Again, play continues until you fail to match the shape before the tile
queue overfills.
The Lost Shapes should probably have spent some more time in play testing to
fully flush out the concept and tune the play balance. As it is, the game starts
out far too easy and then rapidly transitions to much too hard. When the game
starts throwing incompatible special tiles at you and tiles with twisting and
overlapping lines that are hard to discern, the game moves from puzzle play into
simply trying to survive play. Once the board starts to fill up, it is difficult
to scan the tiles for the one that you need and you'll more often than not be
forced to simply grab the next tile off of the queue and drop it anywhere just
so that you can keep scanning the board. The board is also kept crowded by the
fact that making a shape only eliminates one line from a multiline tile and not
the entire tile itself. Add all this to the fact that the basic gameplay premise
of aligning lines into shapes isn't that exciting in the first place and you've
got a game that will probably last you only a couple of plays. After that, the
frustrating speed at which the boards fill up and the lack of compelling
gameplay in the first place will have you losing interest in The Lost Shapes.
Final Rating: 50%
