Shape Time! Review – Time (Sadly) Wasted

Full disclosure here, back at my old job I originally interviewed the devs behind Shape Time! when they were promoting their last game, Wordspionage. I really love that they are putting so much effort into this husband-wife game development team, and all things considered, I wish the best for them. I just also am left to sigh when I look at this game.

Wordspionage had it’s problems, but they were in the process of fixing them, and it had a distinctively promising premise. Shape Time! strangely manages this initial feeling I had with Wordspionage, but it’s further hampered by a lack of ambition, polish, and flair far more so than the previous titles. Even for an iOS/Android title, I just can’t find myself enjoying this title.

Lack of Innovation

The idea is simple enough, slide a bottom bar of four shapes with four colors to grab similarly shaped objects before you run out of tries. A slight added bit of complexity is that you have to also tap to shift colors clockwise across the shapes to match as well. The controls are a bit frustrating as you can sometimes feel like you’re sliding the shapes but then they suddenly break back to where they were, and tapping to hope the colors match in time, with no way to go in reverse, is annoyingly how I more often failed to catch shapes in time.

This is almost all the game is though. There has been real effort that I could find to provide more than that. Any game, be it Candry Crush or Mass Effect, has to provide new gameplay hooks and twists to the core design to keep you interested. All that changes it up are two power-ups. One makes everything the same color so you just have to focus on shapes (there’s no all one-shape power up though), and a power-up that slows down time. In theory these powers could be used to liven things up, but you only unlock them every now and then, and they are also the freemium element of the game, as are daily lives (you get five by default).

It doesn’t do the game any favors (other than being highly portable to older Android devices) that the graphics look like shapes out of Paint.Net filled in. I know that there isn’t a lot you could do for the core UI and object design but… any kind of life would be good. Even just some shine on the shapes, a gently breeze of clouds in  the background to fit with the quite pleasant music — anything.

Or take the minimalistic, almost child’s book style graphics and roll with that. Make a world with that simplistic pallete of pure colors and simple shapes. You could do a lot with that, a phrase I’m left to say for most of the game. You could have a great little reflex-puzzler in the works here, but as it is, this feels like a proof of concept demo. It’s free to play, but if there’s nothing to keep people playing other than a basic leaderboard… why bother? Leaderboards only appeal to a small niche, and they’re going to be more focused on something like Jetpack Joyride than this.

It’s not that Shape Time! is a bad game, although it’s controls certainly could do with a tune up. I found it pleasant enough but it’s only pleasant enough for a few times before you stop touching it again. It needs longevity, it needs staying power, and it needs depth. There is a good game in this concept, the game designer within me knows that, but the game journalist within me also knows this is not going to sell. I hope Napland can update it and give the title the upgrades it deserves, because it’d be a be pity otherwise. Still, you’ve got far better things to download on your smart device of choice.