Back in May we got in touch with Polar Bird Studio to find out more about their upcoming iOS debut, The Way We Roll. It’s an apt title for a game about a family of space-faring, talking orbs trying to help one of their kind roll its way to freedom after it’s crash landed on a planet that lends itself to logic puzzles. The devs stopped in with a preview build last week and we’ve been blasting our neurons quite a bit since then!
Calling The Way We Roll merely a “logic puzzler” is selling it short; it’s a full-fledged puzzle adventure and that bodes well for its chances of standing out from the crowd. Most iOS puzzlers have a linear progression: go in, get your performance stars, go back if you don’t have enough to break into the next world. The Way We Roll tosses that model aside in favor of a heavily branching overworld map that lets you pick your brain-teasing battles, finding another route when you’re at an impasse. Carefully scour the game’s levels and you’ll turn up the occasional secret stage, adding even more offshoots to the world map.
The Way We Roll will also be remembered for the amount of control players get to exercise over its environments. The first few levels play just as you’d expect of a logic puzzler — as you flick a wide-eyed marble across the field you get the feeling you’re trying to divine the designer’s intent for a perfect solution. Once you’re given some freedom to slide stopping points around, however, you get the impression that you’re actively taking part in developing the solution for that level. True, the dev’s gotta have something specific in mind, but that fact gets lost in your own enjoyment much more easily when you’re bending the level to your own will.
Levels are growing absolutely huge as we make our way further into the preview build, so we’ll keep plugging away and give you a full review when the game rolls into the App Store. Be sure to check out the Polar Bird blog and Facebook page, where updates are sure to flow in as it gets closer to the finish line.