iAppLover

Now free games don’t usually need reviews. After all, they’re free – it costs nothing but time to check them out. Trace is one of those few games that definitely deserves a shot and a review. You reap what you sow generally, but Trace gives you a lot more for the price, or the lack of it anyway. It’s an iPhone game that you may enjoy.

With an on-screen controller, you and your avatar, a little red line, to a little swirly thing. Yeah, that might be vague, but it’s really the best way to describe it. It’s a side-scrolling adventure with the pits, spikes and all other kinds of crazy stuff that run around side-scrollers. Obstacles are plentiful. It throws wave after wave of levels after you until you finish it, which each level being timed. Your final score is the sum total of all the time you spent in the levels and much like golf and limbo, the lower the better.

Trace gets its name from your ability to draw in different routes and paths to the final destination. You can make these routes and lines anywhere on the screen for your line avatar to run around in. Bridges, walls and everything else – they’re all waiting for you to draw them in. Perhaps you want some protection from the pits that Mario hates, or perhaps you need to get to a higher area.

The graphics are childish, which is perfect for the theme and genre and the mechanics of the game. Now, an iPhone isn’t exactly a gaming machine but the game runs smoothly – no lag whatsoever, no matter how much stuff is on the screen. It looks like the designers and maker had plenty of fun making the game itself, which really shows when you get into it.

There are six main worlds offered in this free game. Like most things, it starts with the most basic shapes, until you get to well done areas. A fan favorite is the chalkboard level, where you adventure with your red line through math problems and symbols. Okay, that may be a nightmare for some people but it’s still a load of fun. With a massive twenty levels per world, Trace brings to your iPhone one hundred and twenty levels for you to adventure in.

The music for each world is very fitting – you would think that bringing the atmosphere to something that seemed like it was made in Microsoft Paint would be impossible, but they actually manage to do it. If anything, the real trouble in the game comes from the onscreen control pad, which causes some trouble. Sometimes, you just don’t get the button you want and you go spiraling into pits. If they polished the controls just a little more, this would actually be a game that many people would pay for.