Knowing how many turns you have left before you run out of 'pushes' allows you to plan ahead and set the board for sweeping chain reactions, and the thrill of knocking these down and watching the domino effect more than makes up for the sense of inscrutability you feel while learning the basic game and developing early strategies.īeneath the blustering overlay, Fractals is a beautiful game, marrying the elegance of its arithmetical visual logic with a colour palette delicately pipetted from nature: washed-out sunset oranges blend with noonday yellows, while fuchsia pinks and sub-zero blues edge each hexagon. Bombastic messages streak across the screen as blooms trigger, while the discrete outputs aggregating towards your score in any single 'push' stack on screen in a pleasing read-out. Before you make it out of the first third of the game you will be juggling multiple colour hexes on the grid (only like-coloured hexes can be matched together), while the introduction of mines and a lightning tile that clears all connected tiles of the same colour introduces an element of semi-unforeseeable randomness to keep things dynamic and unexpected.Ĭipher Prime works hard to inject what might otherwise have been a somewhat staid and cerebral experience with arcade fizz. The campaign is spread across 30 levels that scale in difficulty faster than most puzzle games of this ilk. Create a grouping of seven hexes in the 'push' and they disappear in a particle-spewing 'bloom', moving you seven points closer to the total to clear the level. Doing so pushes the adjacent tiles outwards by one space, creating new hexes in the displaced spaces. You must clear a set number of hexagons by tapping on empty spaces on the grid. The rules are disarming in their simplicity - but it takes time before you begin to feel out the boundaries of possibility and strategy. But Fractal: Make Blooms Not War (from Auditorium and Pulse developer Cipher Prime) shares only a few strands of DNA with the tired match-3 genre, instead asking that players clear seven like-coloured hexagons in a game of block shunting of often confounding complexity. OS: OS X version Leopard 10.5.8, Snow Leopard 10.6.3, or later.Puzzle games that trade in honeycomb hexagons crowd the gaming landscape.Arcade Mode is the only timed mode in the game, as well as the only mode to give players infinite pushes. These are challenges with specific requirements that become increasingly difficult over the course of the game. Puzzle Mode includes over 50 levels of varying difficulty. Checkpoints are given after every ten levels, with new concepts introduced periodically. The default Campaign Mode is a traditional single-player mode of 30 levels. The game includes three modes: Campaign, Arcade, and Puzzle. The power-ups range from lightning (which "zaps" any same color fractals that are touching each other), explode (which blows up a hexagonal amount of fractals), and even mode-specific fractals that add time to the clock (particularly in arcade mode). Multiple colored stages are organized by the color of the next Fractal, whereas one push will cause a pink Fractal and another will cause a blue Fractal. In the later levels of the Campaign Mode, multiple colors and power-up blocks are introduced. These Fractals have a chance of forming a Chain Reaction with other Fractals in the playing field, allowing for the possibility of long and impressive combos involving a variety of Blooms, Clusters, and Chain Reactions. Multiple colors are introduced quickly in the game.Īdditionally, when creating a Bloom, the Fractals on the edge of the reaction are pushed back one space. Once seven or more Fractals have been arranged into a Bloom (multiple Blooms form Clusters), the included Fractals disappear, as more appear on the playing field. Pushing a Fractal creates a second Fractal in the first Fractal's place, and moves the first Fractal one space in the aimed direction. To do this, the player must push the Fractals. The purpose of the game is to arrange seven Fractals into a hexagonal shape, which is also known as a Bloom. The game was released on (at 12:14 pm EST, due to various issues with their host, Media Temple, which was under a DDoS attack on the scheduled release date of May 24, 2010), with the team releasing an MP3 of the main theme of the game on as a bonus for those who preordered the game.įractal was released on Steam for Mac and PC on Novemunder its full title, Fractal: Make Blooms Not War. Overview The core goal is to "push" Fractals to create hexagonal Blooms.ĭeveloped by the same team that created the acclaimed Auditorium, Fractal is a PC and Mac puzzle game.
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