MouseCraft

Puzzle games are all about the level design. I've played plenty of games that had interesting mechanics but were either too easy so you never had to play around with them, or so hard that you got stuck and furious. Mousecraft got it spot on. Decent difficulty curve, enough to make you think, not enough to get fed up and go play something else. Loved it.

It's a nice little puzzle game. Nothing special but nice and relaxing. It's something I'd give my children to play if I had any, even the level editor is really nice and easy and could be used by children to make some fun levels as well. The difficulty curve is very weird, in the middle I just wasn't able to get all the crystals but the last levels were really easy. Linux port is mostly good although for some reason the desktop mouse cursor wasn't hidden and so I had two cursors on top of each other but it didn't bother me. The timing is a bit buggy though, sometimes I had a mouse being in explosion range and sometimes not when running exactly the same setup again. I'd recommend it for about 4 or 5 dollars.

Summary: I found it to be a relaxing and low-frustration diversion as an adult, and this would be a great game for kids and teens who want a fun challenge in logical thinking. This fun and fairly easy puzzle game has 80 levels. The difficulty ramp is very gentle. Certain (few) levels are especially fiendish and require clever thinking, especially when there is a scarcity of pieces to work with. Most levels simply require good planning and placement of pieces, with good timing now and again for a slight challenge (only slight, because you can and should pause any time you need to make major shifts to the playing field). In other levels, the design suggests obvious placement of pieces and it feels merely like an exercise to guess where things are meant to fit. As you gain new types of pieces they do not make the puzzles more difficult; instead you get easy tutorial levels to explore each piece. In the home stretch of the game, where you might except the puzzles to be very demanding, I found the game actually became easier because of new, flexible-use pieces. This game's biggest weakness is that the difficulty comes to a plateau fairly early, and rarely rises to higher challenges. I STRONGLY recommend playing for "gold" on all levels (all mice saved, all blue shards collected). I did this, but as a casual player I thought it was still too easy to get 100% of the achievements. I'm reducing its rating because there are still some bugs where the game gets in an unplayable state. Usually I could recover with a few key taps but I had to restart the program twice because of this problem.

It first looked like intellectual strategic puzzler, but after a few levels you will discover boring story and more tedious designed, and monotonous levels. In the end I feel developers wasted game potential, and we get mediocrity puzzler.