Oh, how we resisted charging into this review with many a terrible pun. This is a game that’ll really get those cogs turning! A game so simple-yet-fiendish, it’ll really grind your gears! They might not be metal, but these gears are solid! And those were the best ones, trust us.
Yes, Geared is a puzzle game, available to download now for iPhones (iOS 3.0+) and Android devices (1.6 Donut+) in various incarnations now.
Like most successful puzzlers, the premise is incredibly simple. There’s one big rotating yellow cog at one end of the screen and a blue cog (or cogs) that require motion. You do this by dropping grey cogs into the field of play, which come in varying sizes and a finite number.
Again, like most puzzlers, things start out deceptively easy. Things get awfully tricky in later levels when things like pink gear-jamming cogs get thrown into the mix. Many later levels also feature red ‘no drop zones’ where the centre axle of a gear can’t be directly placeed, requiring a bit of planning and forethought.
Geared is a bit of a cerebral one, featuring some very basic graphics (Doodle Jump, Slice It! kinda thing)
The iPhone version costs 59p, whereas the Android one is free (albeit ad-supported). The iPhone version however recently updated with some new levels, giving it a total of 200 puzzles as opposed to the Android version’s 150.
There’s also Geared 2 for iPhone/iPad that was released last year; this features more of the same but with an even more doodlier visual style and a giant hamster that runs around inside the yellow cog…
The original 150 levels of the first Geared game have been given the treatment for iGeaPads, coming with a fresher design re-optimised for the bigger screen.
Developer Playful Art is also working on something called Revolution for Windows Phone 7 phones. This looks to be a WP7-only deal and features more of the same, only with a blueprint-style aesthetic instead of the graph paper one. This one looks set to feature just 75 levels but it features Xbox Live integration, so at least you can rack up some profile points on the bus.
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