Amazing Alex on Android

Rovio from the makers of the world hit phenomenon Angry Birds (where it all started.) Comes a different approach but still uses physics and the power of the mind comes the new game released by ROVIO. Amazing Alex.

Enough of those chirp chirp and tweet tweet. This games is a puzle game. Amazing Alex is a dark, macabre story. One day, Casey from Casey’s Contraptions simply disappears without a word. His family is worried sick. They search everywhere, fearing the worst. Suddenly, they find him on the side of the road! Except it isn’t him, is it? He’s unharmed and innocent, to be sure. And happy. A little too happy. Like Casey though, he gets right back to tinkering with toys and home brewing elaborate machines, building more than ever. All with a hollow, dead-eyed smile on his face. What happened to their son!?

All right, I give. That’s the plot to Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s A.I. But in some senses, I feel it has a little bit of truth to it. On paper - and even in practice - Amazing Alex is sleeker, more modernized version of Casey’s Contraptions: the playful puzzler developed by Snappy Touch whose rights were purchased by Angry Birds giant Rovio. And yet for everything gained in the transition, there’s a charming je ne sais quoi that seems to have been cast off.
For those who never played the original game (but who have doubtless heard of this one thanks to the all-seeing eye of Rovio HQ’s marketing), Amazing Alex is a game with its DNA firmly planted in the works of master tinkerer Rube Goldberg. Taking the role of mischevious, potentially artificially intelligent Alex (all right, I’ll drop it!), you cobble together elaborate machines that appear more like miniature obstacle courses. Pipes that lead a tennis ball into a basket. A balloon that sets of a chain reaction of books-turned-dominoes. All to snag three strategically placed stars, and earn the right to experiment with more complex toys: boxing gloves, magnets, swinging baskets.

To be clear, Rovio hasn’t changed anything functional about this IP. In fact, for this initial release, they’ve maintained level-for-level the game the game that was removed from the store when Casey’s Contraptions was purchased. And before you previous Casey owners get too up in arms over the issue, let me tell you why that’s actually a good thing.
Casey’s Contraptions was a great idea. A wonderful, childlike idea with tons of depth, whose genesis we clearly see in PC-era classics like The Incredible Machine. By maintaining the game writ large, Rovio is capitalizing on the all the things SnappyTouch had going for them with the original. Namely, the instant allure of taking things we think we recognize (boxes, balls, books, balloons) and turning them into something else entirely: elevators, ramps, funnels, seesaws, anvils.
While perhaps dwelling too long on the “tutorial” mindset, the game ultimately finds its way to a puzzle-lovers sweet spot, with masterful design allowing for many solutions for each puzzle, all while requiring you to carefully consider the effect of each item. And in that perfect place between slapdash and impenetrable, Casey’s Contraptions found something foundational to fun: a sense of creation. A sense that despite the constraints of a created world, you were still the one doing the building, and coming up with answers only you had thought of. Far from lazy, Rovio proves just how clever they are by refusing to mess with that. And in the process, Amazing Alex’s gameplay loses nothing for it.

Are you witty enough to take the challenge.

Download this on Google Play.