Glide might look like another moving-block puzzle game, but it turns out it has a bit more working in its favor than its rival apps.
Glide’s style of puzzle game is not exactly my cup of tea. Last year, I reviewed a similar game, Iced In, and found it lacking, citing a lack of real stakes in the gameplay.
On first blush, Glide would appear to have the same problem. Specifically, that you can just endlessly try to solve the puzzle at hand, mindlessly moving blocks without losing or restarting or running out of time. Glide sidesteps these issues cleverly by providing not only an in-game timer, but a move counter.
It doesn’t exactly force failure on you, but the high score list will reveal if you took five minutes to solve a very easy puzzle. This subtle form of judgment is exactly what a game like Glide needs. So immediately, Glide is a more compelling game than Iced In.
The other thing that makes Glide fun to play is that it doesn’t waste too much time on the simple puzzles. There are the requisite few “getting to know you” easy early levels, but by the fifth level, there are already new gameplay wrinkles, like a movable block that you can use to get your game piece in a better position, making the concept much more challenging than it otherwise would be.
Visually, Glide won’t impress anyone. It’s a pretty drab, uneventful game, graphically. But in a puzzle game like this, visuals aren’t really the point anyway. Mostly, Glide is a good, challenging moving-block puzzle game that forces me to admit there might be merit to this style of puzzle game after all. If you were already a fan of this type of game, Glide is well worth checking out.
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