You can tell the app is very inventive and unique the moment you turn it on. A fake phone call comes into your iPhone from a woman named Sophia. She goes on to explain your mission and set up what little story there is. The creativity at work here definitely made me chuckle.
The gameplay consists of four different kinds of classic puzzles. The first is that ancient move-blocks-out-of-the-way-to-get-to-the-exit puzzle. The second is a weird version of Sudoku involving pebbles with color coded symbols. The third involves controlling a little robot to push power blocks onto predetermined squares. The fourth and final puzzle is the classic slide-blocks-around-to-complete-a-picture. I don’t know what kind of security this vault uses, but it makes absolutely no sense, and I’m fairly sure that not even Danny Ocean’s 11 could crack it.
You must complete puzzles to build up enough energy to disable one of the vault’s four security measures, dividing the puzzles into four tiers of difficulty. The puzzles start out extremely easy, but it doesn’t take long for the difficulty to ramp up. By the time you hit the third tier, your brain might hurt a little bit.
If you are a puzzle aficionado, you should already have this app downloaded. There may not be any totally original gameplay here, but this is classic puzzle gaming at its finest. Game Center achievements are also thrown into the mix. Should you make it to the end and finally crack open the vault, there is a real life prize; a redeemable copy of a Steam game that retails at $9.99. You can definitely expect a bunch of downloadable “guides to The Heist” apps to start pouring into the app store. I’ve read that the Steam game is specifically for the Mac, which is lame, as I don’t have one, but I don’t know if that’s entirely true yet.
Either way, The Heist will only cost you $0.99, and it offers some great classic puzzles and a real life prize at the end worth 10 bucks. You do the math.
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