TapCritic – Honest iPhone and iPod Touch App Reviews

My lower lip is chapped, and it’s all due to a crazy-addictive game called Just Fillin’, by Playtoniq.  It’s available starting today for $0.99 on the iTunes App Store.

See, when I play these stressful, skill-based games, I get lost in them.  Everything fades out.  I could be set on fire and I would neglect to notice. It’s the ultimate form of meditation.  But I also have a habit of biting my lip in worry.  Hence the whole chapped thing.

This happen to anyone else?  Okay, moving on.

The interface is simple, but it still manages to be entertaining.

The idea of Just Fillin’ is simple.  You start with a screen half-filled with water and a number of flying, unexplained spikey villains.  They bounce randomly around your screen using a simple physics engine.  Your goal is to “blow” bubbles by holding your finger to the touch screen for as long as you can.  On release, your bubble solidifies and drops into the water, filling it.  When you fill it to the brim, the level is complete.

Only, those spikey bastards keep trying to rain on your parade.  If one of them hits your bubble in mid-fill, it pops.  Pop too many bubbles, and the game is over.

See the maddening simplicity?

Damn you, nebulous adversaries!

In addition, you have a finite number of bubbles you can blow, so tapping a thousand tiny bubbles just won’t work.  FOILED AT EVERY TURN!

You can play on Normal or Hard mode.  The difference is the number of bubble pops allowed and the speed of the spikey-balls-of-death.  With fifty levels, I think I will be playing this for a long time to come.

Let’s get down to brass tacks: the gameplay is very fun, the design is ridiculously cute, and the app is as stable as can be. In addition to blowing bubbles, you can tilt the iPhone to make bubbles tumble away.  This becomes a key feature in higher levels as you use your larger bubbles to knock away chinese-stars-of-carnage and clear a space to make a new bubble.

Will it go round in circles, baby?

The app isn’t terribly feature rich, focusing instead on good, simple gameplay.  In the menu, however, you can change a few things of note.  You can alter the y-offset, making sure that the bubble is being blown appropriately to your individual, oversized finger.  You can toggle sounds, vibration, and the submit scores feature on and off.  And–coolest of all– you can change what level your game begins on in both Normal and Hard mode.  You can start from any level you have already been to, which means the days of playing mindlessly through dozens of already-conquered levels are over.  If not for this option, this game could get really annoying really quickly.

If you are mid-game and are interrupted by a boss asking about the TPS reports that were supposed to be on his desk yesterday, just hit the Home button and come back later.  The Main Menu screen has an option to resume right where you left off.

A winner is you!

There is one small flaw in gameplay that I should mention.  The “Menu” button stays up on the game screen the whole time.  That’s normally a good thing, except in the heat of the moment, where I have pressed it many times on accident trying to blow a monster, kick-your-ass bubble.  Because of the “Resume” feature, I have always picked up where I left off, but it seems this could be solved with a slide button or some other creative avenue.  The guys at Playtoniq are smart app developers, they can figure it out.

And here is another free suggestion: maybe in future releases of Just Fillin’, you can offer a “Timed” mode, forcing you to race the clock as you blow your bubbles.  This could add even more stress to this lip-biting game.  Just a thought.

Right, then, this is getting silly.

Is it worth $1.99?  Yes–just barely.  Were it $.99, I feel like it would be a wildly popular game.  [In celebration of its release, it is currently available for $0.99. -ed.]  While ridiculously addicting, the game is very simple with few added features, so it’s right on the edge of that two buck limit I have artificially set for myself.  Then again, I am admittedly a cheap bastard, so do what you gotta do.

If you have a couple of bucks lying around and a lot of time to spare, go ahead and grab this game.  And if you don’t have a couple of dollars…well, I pity you, to be quite honest.

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3. Dual Level: It keeps me balanced.