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January 22, 2013
By Saikat Basu
If you have ever played with LEGO or a Meccano set and have loved the brain-stimulating challenge, then Apparatus for Android is right up your alley. Apparatus is a game of logic and creativity. When you combine both these two, you can be sure that it’s also a game that’s a sure shot booster for all the blank moments we start to have with age.
Apparatus enjoys a 4.6 average user rating on the Google Play store. But more than that, I often take a peek at the reviews to see what others are saying about it before I let go of my dimes. Fun, creative, addictive, challenging, and amazing are some of the words thrown around. Words are words, so let’s see if this Android game walks the talk and make your creative cells spark up.
A Brief Guide To Apparatus For AndroidApparatus relies on physics or more pointedly – classical mechanics. If you have ever heard about Rube Goldberg and his gadgets, you will get the point of this game in a pat. You have to build simple to complex mechanical structures to achieve a simple task. The simple task is putting a blue marble (or a few) into a blue goal.
But between the blue marble and the blue goal lies the challenge of taking all the contraptions (planks, weights, pulleys, hammer, nails etc.) presented to you in each level and logically putting them together so that you can move the blue ball towards the goal. And at every point of the puzzle game, you have to follow the laws of physics. So that means nailing or screwing things together just right so that they don’t fall off.
Setting Up ApparatusPay up $2.49 and download Apparatus from the Google Play store. The current version 1.1 is a 9.5MB download for Android 1.6+. You can enable sound effects and music from the starting screen and get on with the game. One of the interesting features of Apparatus is the Sandbox. We shall come back to it later. For now, let’s take on the levels. You have about 44 of them to go through (and also 10 Christmas level packs as a bonus) and each progressively increases in difficulty.
The first level screen looks like this with a few wooden planks, a blue ball, and a goal. The play head button allows you to test and see the success or failure of your contraption.
For the uninitiated, there’s the ‘?’ button which tells you about the objective. The instructions are updated with each change in the implements that you get to construct the machine.
From there on, it is pretty intuitive. Drag the wooden planks and other building components around using the touchscreen and combine them in interesting by mechanically true ways to move the marble towards the goal.
What’s nice about Apparatus is that there’s no time limit. You can take an eternity to complete the puzzles. There are no points or penalties. It is simply a test of logic (and more importantly…patience).
The SandboxThe Sandbox is your own Rube Goldberg lab. You can construct intricate machines from a few basic parts and throw it open to other players. There are two types of Sandbox modes – Apparatus and Challenge. The names are self-explanatory.
The Apparatus mode is where you can construct your machines. There is no objective and you are free to construct any machine you so wish to. The idea is to make working ‘prototypes’ of functional machines from the material provided. This is where you can test the laws of physics and see if your wildest mechanical imaginations can come true!
The Building Challenge mode is where you create your own puzzles and upload it to the Community and ‘challenge’ them to solve it.
The Apparatus website has a gallery of community created models and a few tips to go about it. You can download them to your device and play them as you normally would. The Sandbox and the community levels extend the game beyond the default 44 levels offered by the core game.
Incredibly Simple & Difficult At the Same TimeTrue. Apparatus tests both your logic and creativity like nothing else. If you are interested in lateral thinking, then this is the game for you. The objective is simple, but the gameplay is not as simple as other gravitational physics based games like Angry Birds Space. Its sibling, Bad Piggies is probably closer in the way it involves construction and ingenuity.
Could Apparatus have done something’s better? Yes; probably a hint system would have helped. It’s really frustrating when one is stuck.
I tried out Apparatus on the relatively small screen of my Sony phone. I would recommend that you try it out on a tablet. Moving the parts around and positioning them precisely becomes much easier on a larger screen. Apparatus finds favorable mention on our Best Android Games page. Does it find favor in yours? Play it and come back to tell us.
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