Tower Jelly (Game Review)

Well, I've been busy putting together my book, but now I'm back to new stuff and today will be a review of Tower Jelly from TweenSoft.

Actually maybe the title is Tower Jelly Blocks, or at least that's what the About page says:

You be the judge! Anyway, this is a cool, casual game that is perfect for waiting in line. It won't strain your brain, but you'll have to be alert and tap the screen at just the right time to keep playing.

The basic play is pretty simple. And TweenSoft makes it easy to figure out. They have a Help screen that tells you what to do.

Essentially you have a jelly cube swinging from a rope back and forth, and when you tap, it drops. The first cube lands and you must make the next cube land on top of the first. You get extra points if the second cube lands on top of the first. But if you miss the first cube entirely (or enough so you fall off), you lose a life. Three lives lost and the game is over!

And just in case, when you tap Start Game, you'll get some help again!

The only difference from the Help screen that you get to by tapping Help on the Home screen is that you can tap on Next to continue on to the game itself. Here's the start of the game.

The little X in the lower right corner will let you quit any time. If you tap it, you get this:

Which takes you back to the beginning screen or back to the game you are playing. But you don't want to do that, you want to play! As you drop cubes of jelly, they start piling up and the screen view moves up.

Here's a shot of a cube about to land on another cube. The score at the top right is 100, for dropping one cube. On the top right is the number of lives, represented by three linked hearts. At the lower left is a representation of the current stack. There's one on the stack!

After a few more plays:

There are 8 jelly cubes in the tower stack and I've lost two lives. The higher you go, you see stars and also moving clouds. But when you miss a drop for the third time, you see this:

 

You can see the current high scores (and I'm not one of them).

All in all, a nice little game for taking up a few minutes while you are waiting in line or otherwise bored. Which is a good thing for phone games!

But there are two things that knock off points a little.

Screen Size

The game doesn't fit on the Geeksphone Peak screen. You'll notice a large black area at the bottom.

When I loaded it on to my ZTE Open (both phones running FxOS version 1.2), the screen looks like this:

The screen now fits the phone! And two things that interest me. The bottom of the screen has a little bit of landscape that adds a touch of interest. And I like that little Firefox logo at the bottom that doesn't show up on the Peak. More work needs to be done by TweenSoft to adapt to different size screens. Not easy, and I'll be doing some research and a few posts soon on this subject of screen size.

Audio

There is none. No sound effects, no music. While not required, sound effects add to the fun and a little bit of music is cool. And no one has any excuse to leave out sound effects or music because they can read my post on Adding Music to Your Game at http://firefoxosgaming.blogspot.com/2013/12/adding-music-to-your-game-game.html.

Kudos

When I went to download Tower Jelly onto my ZTE Open, I noticed two apps in the Featured Apps section at the top. The first was RingTone Picker.

I follow @Mte90Net on Twitter and I suggest you do also! It is really cool to be at the top position!

Also I was pleased to see esviji in the #2 spot for all apps! This is a really cool SVG game from Nicolas Hoizey which I reviewed at http://firefoxosgaming.blogspot.com/2014/01/esviji-game-review.html. Way to go!

Score

Cost: Free

Genre: Casual
Score: 4 (out of 5)
Tested on: Geeksphone Peak and ZTE Open
Get it at: Firefox Marketplace https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/tower-jelly