Super Slyder Review

Super Slyder is Astraware’s newest puzzle game. Strange, I feel as if I have heard that before. Many times even. We have seen too many puzzle games for Palm OS already and too many of them were made by Astraware. Still, even an oversaturated market can take new games if they are of very good quality. Is Super Slyder of very good quality? Read on to find out…

In Super Slyder your goal is to press four directional buttons. Not just randomly though. You should press them in a sequence that makes the main character Slyder slide into the green “Beam me one level up, Scotty!” kind of thing. Slyder is not the only thing that slides into the direction you press. There are other cute characters sliding with Slyder, all going into the pressed direction until they hit something, a wall, another character or whatever. These all have different distinguishable looks and gameplay functions. There are the violet guys that slide around like Slyder and can support him so that he can reach another part of the level, the red guys that like to eat Slyder, the fat guys that just sit in the way and many more.

Other things to make the levels, which are constructed from walls and characters mainly, more interesting are keys, doors, pits and swamps which can be passed if one character has died in them. Sounds complex and it makes gameplay quite diverse but there is hardly any learning involved. The first few levels do a very good job introducing you to the gameplay mechanics. The levels then get increasingly difficult to solve.

All in all there is a total number of 245 levels. That is quite a lot on first sight. However, only about 50 of them are really challenging, the others can be played in one go without too much thinking. All in all I would say the game lasts for about 5 hours, more if you try to play to the end with as few moves as possible. Unfortunately the game does not count the moves for each individual level for you to optimize but rather the number of moves you used playing all the levels together. I will say once again that including a level editor would have been a great way to improve this game’s value.

I already mentioned that the characters look cute; the rest of the graphics has a very clean and almost stylish look. Menus are almost non-existent; you navigate through the many levels with left and right arrows which are a little impractical. I am certainly not missing the story Super Slyder does not have but it might have been an excuse for making a better menu system. There are fitting sounds for each of the characters and the background music is not too annoying.

Super Slyder is certainly not an awesome game everybody has to play but it is closing a hole in the market which is the sliding-puzzle-game-with-cute-characters-and-245-levels-hole that was about as big as the chance of me becoming the next American president. Nobody needed it but now that it is here, why not enjoy it anyway?

Screenshots