Â
Mobile phones are everything but, these days. We get to use them for GPS, web browsing, social media and, perhaps most crucially out of all multimedia, playing video games. It’s natural, then, that the demand for something which works perfectly on a touch display is ever-present, and that many developers make it their task to come up with a game that would tap into that potential goldmine. Flow Point is one such game, where fast reflexes and snappy fingers are a must, and there is no winning in the end – only the looming possibility of beating a high score or two.
I done goofed.
As is usually the case with Android releases, Flow Point doesn’t dabble at all with an awkward storyline, menu or anything we’re usually bound to expect upon starting a game for the first time. Instead, you’re presented with a simple, almost confusingly minimalistic screen where all of the game’s functions reside. Well, I say all of them but there’s but a few to fiddle with. Really, the only one to be concerned with is the big ‘play’ button which kickstarts the game. From that point on, it’s all about gameplay, and true to the game’s rather mysterious demeanor, not everything is cleared up well enough before the colored dot starts dying miserably due to your own negligence.
The game sets your screen up in a 4×4 grid, where each node can be interacted with in a way that best suits the given situation. See, Flow Point is a game about predicting just which direction is the small coloured dot moving, and how fast is it going to be once it reaches that node. At any given moment, there are two or three “checkpoints†waiting for you to lead the dot through them. These are fixed and cannot be fiddled with in any way, other than letting the ball mow them down. Now, the challenge lies in connecting these checkpoints, which is essentially what the game is about.
As I said, each node offers some interaction in the form of setting a pipeline of sorts run through them. Along with the dot, you’ll immediately have to start building a pathway towards, through and beyond any and all the checkpoints you can reach before the speed of the dot outmatches your own plumbing skills. Granted, this won’t take long at all, as the dot’s acceleration is quite immense and your own puny human reflexes simply won’t be able to keep up the pace after a while.
The game begins with at a decent pace.
This all sounds pretty good and well in-line with what we’ve come to expect from games such as this by now – infinite, ever-rising challenge, simplicity and the overall arcade-ish feel we all yearn for oh-so-much. There is a ‘but’, however. I would have had nothing but praise for Flow Point had the main gameplay mechanic – that of interacting with the nodes – been more intuitive, but it’s really not. Even after a week of playing the game on a daily basis I still can’t help but cringe at all the taps I have to do – it’s a valid gameplay mechanic, I have no qualms about that, but every single node requires another tap-and-drag, and it becomes tiring fast. See, the manner in which you interact with each given node consists of tapping onto it, holding your finger down and then dragging in the direction in which you want the pipeline to continue leading the dot. My reasoning behind declaring the game not entirely intuitive lies in it quickly becoming so fast that there’s no way for you to do all of those movements for each successive node after getting to, say, 25th checkpoint. That may well be the point, but it still feels as if Flow Point simply isn’t streamlined enough to compete with its ever-growing competition.
When it comes to visuals, Flow Point is well in-line with the current visual style of Android – Material Design. The colours, however, sometimes seem just a tad too bright and could hinder your ability of outperforming your previous high-scores. I have no critique about the sound design though, as the soundtrack is perfectly minimalistic in regard to the rest of the package.
To conclude the review, I would like to point out that despite its shortcomings in terms of not-entirely-intuitive gameplay mechanics and nonexistent leaderboards, Flow Point is still a fairly solid offering to feature in your Android game library. It’s just that it may well become tiring very fast, but this might never be the case if you don’t play it for longer than a round or two in a single session. It runs well even on older-gen devices, is rather tiny and forgiving when it comes to system resources and doesn’t drain the battery nearly as much as some of its contemporaries do. For that alone, and because you can try it out for free, I suggest giving Flow Point a chance and see if it sticks.