Sand Slides – A Simple But Addicting iPhone Game

Although the following is a sponsored review, as always I strive to provide an honest opinion of the product reviewed.

With a $1.99 price tag in the App Store, Sand Slides, a physics-wielding original game runs the risk of being overlooked in a sea of flashy games with thousands of downloads, but when you dig deeper, sometimes you find gems.

First Impressions

I have to come right out and admit that I judge a book by its cover, occasionally, and that’s true with software more than anything. When I first saw Sand Slides, I thought it had some potential, but the graphics didn’t draw me in. They weren’t bad, but I’ve been spoiled with some of the more popular games, I guess. At first glance, this looks like a simple game without a lot of depth, but looks can be deceiving. To be fair, I’m not sure how much you can dress up sand.

How To Play

This is where simple comes in. The basic premise of the game is to get the sand to flow in to the correct bins by color. Blue sand goes in the blue bin, yellow in the yellow, etc. Sometimes you get lucky and it can fall straight in, but usually, it’s up to you to create a slide by drawing a line. The slides help guide the sand to its proper destination.

At the start of the game, you get a kind of bank of 30,000 grains of sand and every grain that goes into the wrong colored bin deducts from your bank and every grain that you get into the proper bins adds to your score. Below is a video showing how the game play works.

It looks easier than it is to keep all your grains, though. In the harder modes, you can easily lose with one simple mistake.

Hard To Put Down

This game was surprisingly addictive. You could spend hours just trying to beat your own personal best score, and when you do, there are several other difficulty levels to try. This is also one of those games that generally only lasts a few minutes, opening the door to that “just one more game before bed” mentality. Losing track of time with Sand Slides was not hard to do.

Conclusions

At $1.99, Sand Slides doesn’t stand out as a deal that you can’t pass up. There are plenty of well-polished games in the App Store that I could easily spend money on, instead. That said, beauty is not just skin deep. The addictive nature and smooth play of this game are features even some of the best dressed apps forget about. If I’m playing this game months from now, it’s $1.99 well spent.

Author: Joe Colburn

Joe Colburn is a software engineer specializing in PHP and a technology enthusiast. Always eager to dive into new and exciting things, Joe writes about anything technology related news and products that he thinks you will also be excited about. Find Joe Colburn on Google+ or by any of the links below. View all posts by Joe Colburn