Contrary to what Angry Birds would have you believe, there are easier ways to demolish a building than pinging a bunch of irate squawkers at it. As Implode! goes to show, blowing it to smithereens can be twice as effective and almost as fun. Read on to find out how in our Implode! review for Nokia Lumia 800.
Just like Angry Birds, Implode! tasks you with destroying a bunch of free-standing structures through the application of some rudimentary physics. In other words, they're both about smashing stuff up.
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The way in which you do this smashing up is drastically different, however. Whereas Rovio's smash hit bird-flinger is all about judging angles and power levels and the challenge of actually hitting the right spot to cause a chain reaction, Implode! shortcuts that process and takes you to the heart of the demolition process.
Here you can directly place a handful of explosive charges on the target structures, with the goal being to drop each building as low and as efficiently as possible. Provided the building crumbles below a preset line, you can progress to the next level, while additional points are awarded for the level of destruction and the amount of dynamite used.
With the problem of conveying your ordnance now removed, the challenge here lies in precision placement. The physics engine here is a tightly honed treat, so repeating the exact same move multiple times will yield identical results - the buildings collapsing in the exact same fashion. There's no hit and hope - if your placement doesn't work the first time, you need to change something.
Placing dynamite is a simple matter of touching the dynamite icon at the bottom of the screen and dragging it into position on one of the structure's beams. Once you've set all the charges you think you'll need, it's matter of hitting the plunger and watching the results. Explosions behave pretty realistically, causing direct damage to blocks in the immediate vicinity and sending out shockwaves that push out adjacent blocks.
You'll quickly pick the up the best placement zones for the early levels, and it can all seem like a bit of a walk in the park (with high explosives). Then, however, you'll be introduced to a new restriction - other buildings that mustn't be touched by any debris. At this point, an element of restraint and control comes into play that's at once intriguing and infuriating. You may be able to send a tower toppling in spectacular fashion, but if so much as a roof tile strays into the no-go zone it's an instant failure.
This swing between super-easy and super-tough can be a little hard to swallow, and is one of the game's big drawbacks. Another is the game's rather functional appearance and structure. The whole blackboard-sketch style is neat enough, but it comes across as a little too sparse and lacking in the character that took Angry Birds to the next level. As hinted at, the gameplay can feel a little too clinical too, with the gleeful abandon of your early experiments soon falling into a rut of learned patterns as you establish the most effective ways to topple certain kinds of structures.
Implode! isn't quite the incendiary experience you might have been hoping for, then, but it is a fine exercise in controlled aggression. It'll destroy a surprising amount of your free time if you let it, and if you're quick, you'll be able to pick it up for £1.49 on the Windows Phone Marketplace.
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