Cross Fingers Review

It is always important for developers to remember the platform they are creating for. On the iPhone, buttons and tiny menus are clumsy, causing the gamer more frustration than fun. On the flipside, the touch-screen is amazing for multitouch and an interface where you interact directly with the game’s subject. Cross Fingers gets this right, with style.

Cross Fingers is a game where you slide different wooden shapes together and into specified areas. At the start of the game this is quite easy, but soon you will be shifting pieces around the board to make them fit into tight areas and keeping red blocks out of the way by holding them back. The latter part calls for multitouch controls, which work very well. Despite the rare unresponsive touch, the experience is seamless.

The game includes 120 levels to conquer across four difficulty levels. However, they don’t last as long as you may think; the levels tend to be much easier than they seem at first. We clocked in around two hours to beat them all. Also, the difficulty levels mean nothing, since we played some of the hardest layouts on easy difficulty and vice versa. This does seem to take away from the feeling of true progression.

Another problem is that the pieces can sometimes stutter under your finger, forcing you to release every other block you may be holding onto. While it isn’t game breaking, it adds a lot of unnecessary annoyance to an otherwise polished experience.

Don’t let these drawbacks stop you from purchasing Cross Fingers if you are interested in this type of puzzle game, though. The included arcade mode adds some extra value once you complete the main game. Here you must use shapes together to fill a square in the center of the screen. The pieces continuously enter from slots at each corner of the board in smaller, more intricate forms. When the screen cannot hold any more pieces, the game is over. A lack of online scoring was disappointing, though.

As long as you don’t mind the generally easy mindset of Cross Fingers, this is a great way to spend a buck. Puzzle people, buy with confidence.