The makers of Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies are back! Sort of. From PopCap Games 4th and Battery division comes Candy Train, a universal app for the iPhone and iPad that is free as I type this. I’m not sure if that’s going to change by the time you read this. In any case, if you have either of those devices and the app is still free, you don’t need me to give you a review. Just go grab it already and come to your own conclusion. If you’d still like to hear what I’d think, then I’m not stopping you from reading my review, either.
Candy Train is a very simple puzzle game along the lines of Pipe Dream. You’re given a tangled mess of railway tracks, and it’s your job to patch them together so that the train has a steady flow of track to ride over. As the game progresses, tracks will change out or break the circle of your current setup so that you’re forced to constantly create a path for the train. To up the ante, there are fruits and other portions of a train in select spots that you can add to your main path that will get you bonus points.
While the game isn’t doing anything new, Candy Train focuses on one gameplay mechanic and does it really well. For as simple as the track connecting mechanic is, it’s really addictive and it’s depth can go really deep if you want. I started out not being able to score more than 200 points a game, but with a little bit of practice and understanding of how the game works, I was able to boost my score to 3,500. I don’t know if that’s a good score in Candy Train, but it was a lot more than I started out with, and I’m itching to stop writing this review so that I can try and top my best to date.
The only things I can knock it for is that it’s really limited in terms of options and that it’s a bit tricky to play on an iPhone. I understand that it’s a free game, but it’d be cool to see more than normal mode and expert mode, which is the same game except with a faster train and a quicker turnover on tracks. Also, the size of the tracks can make it difficult to consistently pick the piece of track you want to rotate because they’re pretty small on an iPhone screen. It’s far from a deal-breaker, but it will get in the way at times. Ideally, you’ll want to play it on an iPad, where I never had any control issues.
There are a lot of crappy games available for free on the iTunes store, and this is not one of them. Candy Train would have still been a good value at a buck or two, but free works even better for my wallet. It won’t blow your mind with anything you haven’t seen before, but it does the Pipe Dream style experience really well and is definitely worth checking out.
In Third Person 