Some puzzle games have such simple mechanics that just about anyone can pick them up and do fairly well without too much effort. Games like these usually rely on something external to the mechanics to add a greater challenge, such as a timer or giving you a penalty for making mistakes. Perfect Paths ($1.99), from Lums ($1.99) developer Hyperbolic Magnetism, is not one of those games. In the broad sense, the rules aren’t that hard to understand. You’ve got a certain number of different colored blocks that each need to be moved to a matching-colored goal. You do this by drawing the paths each block should move, then press the button to execute your plan. If all goes well, you can enjoy watching each block make its way to its final location, all according to your brilliant strategy.
There’s a lot more to it than that, though, and simply knowing the goal doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy to achieve it. The blocks can and will interact with each other, often throwing off your carefully-planned routes, forcing you to go back to the drawing board and try again. If you’ve played Trainyard ($0.99), SpaceChem ($2.99), or even this very developer’s Trappped ($3.99), this game has quite a bit in common with them. Although each new concept of the game is introduced with a useful tutorial, the game wastes very little time putting your understanding to the test. The game has a small count of levels relative to many puzzle games out there, and to its credit and detriment, it wastes very few of them holding your hand.
The game basically comes down to traffic management and navigating areas where you can’t place an arrow. Sometimes you need to get a block to move through a square you can’t draw a path on, so you’ll need to push it with another block. You also have to be very careful about how your blocks and paths intersect. While you can make use of a junction point to allow different blocks to pass through without changing direction, if you do need to change the direction of the path, you can only do so in one direction. Since this will affect every block that passes through and not just the one you may have wanted, you need to think very carefully when blocks are in close proximity to each other. Eventually, the game also introduces links, where you can and usually have to junction two or more blocks together, causing them to drag each other along. Once this concept is added in, the puzzles start to include linked goals that you have to park your little block train into, giving you yet another thing to worry about.
While planning out your paths, it’s important to keep in mind the way the game prioritizes directions. Basically, when you press the button to start everything moving, the game follows a particular turn order for movement. First, all the blocks moving up will go, then all of the blocks moving down, right, and left, before going back around to move blocks heading up again. This is a key point to remember if you want to finish the puzzles, and it might be the actual most important point to keep in mind when you start challenging for a better score. Your score is determined by a few different factors, but one of them is how long it takes you to reach the goal. Taking advantage of the turn order gets you to the goal that much faster, earning you a higher score.
As I mentioned earlier, the game’s puzzle count is a bit lean, with just under 50 available at the moment. The game promises new puzzles every week, though, so if that relatively low count is a problem for you, it’ll likely be solved in the long run. Even without any further additions, the game still has plenty to offer. The upfront challenge is pretty high, and even once you’ve gotten your brain used to the game’s tricks, there’s still the possibility of revisiting stages to find a different and better solution. The game has full Game Center support for leaderboards, with a board for each grouping of stages in addition to one for your total score. You can see the high scores and your standing amongst your friends right from the level select menu, goading you to do just a bit better this time.
I should also point out that while the game is hard, it’s hard in the puzzle sense. You have all the time in the world to plan out your paths without penalty, and after setting them into motion, you’re free to review the movements step-by-step to try and find what went wrong and how best to fix it. You can then go back and adjust your paths, again at no penalty, and try again. The difficulty here is entirely in your ability to wrap your brain around the game’s completely transparent logic. It neither needs nor wants anything more from you than that. Of course, this means that if you get stuck on a puzzle, you’re not going anywhere until you actually focus on the problem and reason it out. Fortunately, there are always a few open puzzles to choose from, so you can try a different one if you can’t figure out what to do. At the very least, the flexibility involved in each puzzle’s solution means you aren’t just looking for a single possibility.
Perfect Paths isn’t going to click for everyone. You have to truly enjoy the idea of carefully planning every single move, watching it all go out the window, and tweaking it again and again until it’s right. Some people just won’t be able to get into its harsh, deliberate gameplay. Those that do catch on to how it works are going to have a great time working their way through the puzzles again and again to try to get closer to perfection. If you enjoyed any of the similar titles I mentioned at the start of the review, by all means, jump into Perfect Paths without hesitation. It’s a very high-quality, polished effort, even if the difficulty curve is probably a bit too high for its own good.
Stratus XL - it will fit perfectly in the pants pocket 😄
It fits mines
Hence the smaller one? maybe?
now i want this. the old one is too small on my hands.
Ditto
Agreed. I'm the same with my droid phone. I have a moga pro for home use (when running through TV for example), and smaller controller for on the go. Likewise, I have a controller for my itouch, but this would go nicely with my iPad for home gaming.
this looks phenomenal for an iPad. But, I think the only company to really get it right is Mad Catz (and that's not even out yet). If you're going to use a controller for iPhone games, it's awkward to just sit it down. You need a stand or some clip attachment.
Still, it looks like controllers are headed in the right direction. This looks super high quality.
Competition seems to be heating up in the MFi controller world. Razer, Hori, Mad Catz, Moga now SteelSeries all launching new stuff. Wonder if we'll see even more at E3.
And about prices, I think people will be pleasantly surprised with the price of the Mad Catz controller.
There is not much competition on the iPad front though compared to iPhone. :/
I'm not so sure. The Mad Catz, this SteelSeries, the Hori controller, the Moga Rebel (if that is still happening), the GameCase, the Signal RPone... lots of iPad controllers of various styles coming soon
Completely agree. Also, I would be (and I suspect A LOT of other people would be) willing to spend $80 to $100 on a Bluetooth MFi Controller if it worked cross-platform between the Mac and iOS. I have a sneaking suspicion that the “game forwarding” technology that was just announced at the WWDC, we will see cross-platform compatibility with these MFi Controllers with the release of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite.
As an early adopter I bought the Steel Stratus. Sick of how controller integration is so limited. It seems quite a few mfi games only work on iPhone-FFIII for iPad doesn't seem to like it. No new adopters since the damn thing came out. What there is is concentrated for iPhone rather than iPad games. Glech.
Signals RP one still looks like the best MFi controller to me
Why is it so expensive? Is it really more expensive to produce than any other game controller?
Its Ridiculous the price of these controllers. Cost more then console controllers. With that you dont even know if the games work with them.
Talk to me when they get down to $30.
If no early adopters buy them when the projected adoption (and thus net income) is uncertain, then the price will never go down. That is true for any new product or product entering a new market, as this one is. Of course it's not more expensive, but if it turns out nobody wants them, you'll have the Atari landfill all over again.
I WANT a controller i just dont NEED a controller.
Im sure people are going to buy it... Im just not one to rush and get some thing blindly. I will just have to wait a couple of years util the prices are more reasonable. By that time most the bugs will be out and more games working with it.
Your going to be waiting a LONG time if you will only buy a controller at $30. Heck, you'd be hardpress to find a Xbox One or PS4 controller for just $30. Seems to me, for a brand new controller, if it's sold at that price it wouldn't leave any profit margin for the hardware manufacturer so then why would they put in the time and investment if it's going to be losing them money?
Now if you said you weren't willing to buy a controller until the price got down to $60 or $50 dollars, well that makes a little more sense since you can find brand new controllers at that price point.
Anyways, personally I would be willing to spend $80 on a certified MFi controller if it worked cross-platform between Mac and iOS.
I concede to the $50-60 mark
'Controllers for All' remains the best Jailbreak tweak of all time for us gamers on iOS 7.0.x. I bought a second hand PS3 controller for $20 to use with my i
Pad and couldn't be happier. When official controllers drop below $50 I might take another look.
Hmm... If this comes out in the fall, then I might just go for the Mad Catz CTRLi, which is supposed to release this month
I really want to like the stratus. $99 price point is not a big deal for me (not that I am rich, but I am already used to the Apple Tax). It seemed like the best controller out there for iOS. I always imagined myself using my iPad Air as the display while using a controller for playing. But one session of Real Racing 3 had proven that thought wrong already. The stiff and tiny analog stick makes steering input way too sensitive. The d-pad felt VERY unnatural when steering the car. The biggest problem I felt was the lag between my input and the outcome in the game. The lag really throws me off in corners. When playing other shooters or action games, those mentioned were non-issues, as input accuracy is not as necessary. I think this example really showed that Firemonkeys did a superb job at optimizing the touch screen, and also showed that they did not really do the same for a physical controller (or they did, but that's the best they can muster?). The controllers can keep coming and keep improving on physical feel, but I hope the lags and sensitivity issues do too, then I believe the controllers (and iOS as a serious gaming device) will truly show their potential.
That's a matter for software optimizations, for the most part. The analog sticks do not feel stiff in the least to me, and anyway given the differences in that department between, say, the 360 controller and the PS3 (not to mention the infinite number of controllers of other parties in the past decades), it is a subjective matter at best.
Never tried Real Racing 3 with the Stratus as I'm not really into simulations, but on Asphalt 8, for example, I felt it did a reasonably good job and only needed a bit of tweaking in how it handled drift (with touch, you initiate it and calibrate it with tilt, but with the controller, it sometimes exited the drift while steering, possibly because of how the dead zone for the drift had been programmed). So all in all, this type of issue is not really against controllers so much as about optimization.
I have to say it would be optimization largely responsible for the lagging. But I should really say the "stiff" part really comes in when I am moving the stick away from the neutral position. It's fine when it's at a scale that is on a regular sized controller like the dualshock and possibly, the stratus XL ( and I think on a larger controller, it would be imperative to maintain that "on-center" feel). This "issue" seem to magnify itself on a pocket controller that's also having a lag issue and on a racing simulation. I feel totally fine using my stratus when playing minigore, though. And above all, I really wish the mfi controller will become more mainstream and maintain better consistence across both software and hardware, or vice versa.
I wish the same. As for the stiffness, like I said, it's rather subjective, both from your perspective and that of controllers. I used to buy different controllers for different types of games on PC, too, 15 years ago.
Will this work on my Mac too? That would make games tons better. If not, what's a good game controller for Mac games??
You can get logitech, ps3, even xbox... Just need a controller program you can get from the mac app store.
Thanks for the help
http://toucharcade.com/2014...
Whatever happened to this controller? I've been asking about it but no ones seems to know.
Why are we paying $80-$100 for subpar controllers that are not even completely accepted by the developers? An Xbone controller is higher quality with more components and cheaper. Also, there I feel like games are still going to be built for touch controls with these as a second thought as they can't count on the community fully embracing them. I was initially excited but price and actual utilization of the controller to set it apart from touch controls seems to be disheartening.
Subpar? Maybe some, but not all of them, and that isn't any different than any other environment anyways. An X1 controller may well be higher quality but is pushed by an environment that is orders of magnitude more profitable. This is an emerging market and so prices are of the early adopter fashion.
Sure, some games will be built for touch only, and that's fine. Some will even be built with MFi support as an afterthought, but as the api matures and optimization becomes easier, that afterthought will be enough.
I understand... Just seems like if price matched the underutilization... Or better yet, I'd rather a cheap, lesser quality controller to buy, use with the few games it actively enhances and watch the market for them and games grow together. I've been asking for a controller for a long time now and as 90% of my gaming is on IOS id like to see it grow... Just feels disjointed atm.
These wireless controllers really need a clip to attach the phone.
Assuming you want to use them with the phone.
PS3 controller is cheaper and has a tried and true form factor. PS3 controller is less than half the price. These are for suckers!
I agree. I have been using my PS3 controller to play GTA San Andreas and Galaxy on Fire 2 on the IPad. $100 is too much for these controllers. $50 would be a more acceptable price range. Until then, PS3 controller will do.