Since Doodle Jump, Doodle games have been doodling their way onto the iPhone fairly regularly. It’s fair to say they’ve been a mixed bag, so when Doodle Fit landed on the store a few days ago we were keen to see how well it fared.
When playing Doodle Fit your aim is simple: use the shapes available to fill the picture in any way you can. Many puzzles have multiple solutions making them slightly easier initially, but the game tracks how many of the possible solutions you’ve found, so if you want completeness you’ll need to work them all out. Tricky.
Unlike similar games of its ilk, Doodle Fit doesn’t let you rotate or flip the shapes at your disposal. What you’re given is what you’ve got, which provides both a challenge and a frustration factor as you get to the final piece and curse quietly that it would fit perfectly if you could rotate it 90 degrees. But that’s all part of the challenge, and if you find yourself in that situation you might only need to move a couple of pieces. Although you might even need to completely redo the puzzle from scratch, it all depends where you went wrong.
There are loads of puzzles to be had, starting fairly simple but becoming fiendishly hard as you reach the 3rd and 4th group of puzzles. Each level is timed, but I saw no way of checking my previous times to try and beat them – it seems to time the levels for the sole reason of monitoring how long you’ve played for in total. Something of a shame, and certainly a missed opportunity.
A nice touch is the choice of whether to use a white or black background (“notebook or chalkboard” if you prefer), making the game far more playable in bed with the lights off. A fair bit of imagination has gone into the puzzles, and each has its own title which tells you what the shape is meant to look like. Most, as you can see from the castle in the screenshot above, have a pretty good resemblance of what they’re meant to be. One other thing that worked really well was how you pick up and move the pieces. Instead of staying under your finger where you can’t see them, the pieces hover higher up the screen, so my chunky fingers never stopped me dropping the pieces exactly where I wanted them.
The number of puzzles available here will keep you going for a fair while, especially given how tough they become, but I can’t help but feel there’s a missed opportunity with the level timing, and once they’re all finished there’s no real reason to play through again. But on the flip side, it’s only 59p (or 99c) and if you like your puzzle games it’s money well spent.
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Price: £0.59 / $0.99
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