Mobile game reviews

TECHLIFE’S TEAM REVIEWS THE LATEST GAMES FOR ANDROID & iOS SMARTPHONES & TABLETS.

Aurora SAVE DEM KITTIES! Free for a limited time in AU; TBC price elsewhere | www.silverbackgames.com

DROP EVERYTHING! A pair of evil yellow sky eyes stole my shiny things and all my kittens! We have to save them all!

The aim of this game is to reunite Aurora with all her feline friends and — boy — does she have a lot of those...! Each level involves selecting adjacent coloured blocks in groups of three or more in order to clear a path to the level’s lost cat. The blocks are all brightly coloured and easy to tell apart, which is handy, but there are sometimes more layers of them than you can immediately see, meaning you’ll probably have to try the level again with this extra knowledge in mind.

You can’t move the squares (well, not in the early levels, anyway), but you can move the camera — meaning that perspective is everything. If three squares are on opposite ends of the board but look like they’re touching from one angle, you’re in business. It’s a bit like if Candy Crush met Monument Valley and had a baby, but with cats, crates, hammers, lava and butterflies.

Gravity plays a big part in the gameplay here. Like Candy Crush, clearing out a group of identical squares will cause any on top of them to fall down, meaning you have to make sure you’re not leaving any single squares by themselves or clearing too many squares at once, as Aurora sometimes needs to use leftover blocks as stairs or a bridge across deadly spikes or bubbling lava.

The introduction of water blocks a dozen or so levels in means that Aurora can swim directly upwards, or later, the water blocks can fall down upon a lava block, creating a safe ‘earth’ block for Aurora to cross.

Things really start getting hard, however, when the rotating block pushers make an appearance, meaning you can start to move the blocks and crates around.

The art is quite charming and bright — and the levels adopt different themes quite often. One minute, you’ll be a flowery green environment, the next in a blackened toxic world, then in Egypt. The incidental music doesn’t grate on you as you ponder, too, which is perfect for this kind of game.

The only gripe we have with Aurora is that new gameplay mechanics are introduced very slowly, meaning the beginning of the game feels a little samey before water blocks arrive.

But stick around and it turns into a great little puzzler. We’ve saved 107 cats so far, and we mean to save them all!