Crayon Physics Deluxe

Crayon Physics Deluxe $19.99
Total Time Before: 0 Hours
Total Time After: 5 Hours

Review

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a puzzle game where you are attempting to get a ball to a star. Sounds easy enough. You accomplish this by drawings lines and shapes to try to influence that ball to go where you want. Physics are indeed in play, allowing you to create catapults, simple levers, and any other thing you can think of.

 Some solutions are simple

There are eight separate islands, each with a number of puzzles for you to solve. As you beat levels and add to your number of stars, you unlock these new islands. Each level has 2 stars to add to your total. The first is the obvious one, the one you move the ball to to end the level. The second, took me a little bit to understand. No real tutorials or help is given, so after finishing the first island I was surprised I was missing half the stars available.

You see, each level also has 3 objectives along with just finishing the level regularly. They're the same for every level unfortunately, and one just involves clicking into some menus. The other two are called "Elegant" and "Old School". Elegant means you can only draw one line, along with pins (basically pivot points for your shapes). Old school doesn't allow pins or clicking on the ball to get it started. The last objective is simply saying your solution is "Awesome". You achieve this by going into the menu of the level and clicking awesome over your solution. It's annoying after the first time. I don't want to go through every level and click through the menus. I think its obvious I think all my solutions are awesome, isn't that enough?

If going for all the stars, its going to take some thought

Most of the levels can knock everything off in one play, by only using one shape and not clicking the ball to drive it forward. Some are quite easy if you think about the physics involved and create levers. Others are based on pure stupid luck. The levels with rockets in particular, many of them are just about drawing the shape you want to drag the ball and rocket together and hoping for the best. But most levels are fun and do require some thought and trial and error. Some make excellent use of the environment, adding boats, cars, clouds and other things that also rely entirely on the physics of the level. Making a sled to drag the ball behind a car to the star looks ingenious, and when you do it, you feel proud that you created that solution, even though probably everybody else thought of the same.

This level haunts my dreams

Most my solutions probably weren't the most efficient, but I made them work. I unlocked 141 stars in the end, missing 16. You only need 120 to unlock the eighth island, which only contains one level. I basically completed the first 6 islands totally, but got frustrated with many of the 7th island's levels and only completed them regularly, without the extras.

The physics are sometimes quite wonky. Drawing a line under the ball to a large weight sometimes results in the ball sometimes being the heavier of the two, even on a smaller lever, but overall, it works.

The music can't be anymore annoying. It attempts to be relaxing, but after the first island I was over it and promptly muted it. If there were at least different music for each island, I wouldn't have minded, but the unending song for 5 hours would have been far too much.

The hand drawn world looks good, based upon the presumption you're playing with crayons. The folded sheet of paper for the background gives it a nice touch.

The game also includes a level editor, allowing you to try and puzzle your friends with your own devious designs. I wish workshop were included in this game, because I'm sure some people could come up with absolutely ridiculous levels.

Final Verdict

Gameplay: 7/10
Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 3/10
Puzzles: 8/10
Replay: 8/10 (at least for max stars)

Overall: 7/10

A good puzzle game. I'm sure many have it because of the Humble Bundle, so give it a go if you feel like being stumped via physics. Just don't get too frustrated with those damned rockets.

Sidenote:
----
Victoria II is going as well as expected. I finished the tutorial and began my rise to power. I decided to start with a less civilized nation, without many neighboring countries to contend for resources and land with, the tiny nation of Sokoto in Africa. Not sure if this is a good plan or not, as they are ranked 95/125 in the world. We shall see.

The next rolled game comes out to be...
Cthulhu Saves the World!
I have no idea what it is other than an old school RPG. Not sure if an update will be coming this Saturday, as I'll be out of town with the in-laws, depends on if I can sit down and write. If not, Sunday evening or Monday morning a new update will be posted. Hope everybody had a Merry Xmas.