I am a huge fan of Incredible Machines. I played that game non-stop when I was a lot younger, all the way up to just about last week! Well, Cogs isn’t exactly Incredible Machines, but it certainly does bring up quite a few memories of Incredible Machines.

Cogs is a great puzzle game where you are tasked with solving the problem at hand: you need a bell to be chimed, you need to redirect gas from the source to the balloon or output or whatever, or you need to crank the Jack-in-the-box to come out of his damned hidey hole. Regardless of the task at hand, you are judged by your solution, the time it takes to find that solution, as well as the number of moves it took you to find that solution. Just keep shifting those tiles!

This blue gas tastes funny.

To shift a tile, you just tap on it and it moves to the open space. You can also shift multiple tiles (Which counts as one move!) if you have more than one or two in a line that you want to move. There are also little dynamics of moving around gears and possibly other items, where if you move a gear into other gears, you are probably going to cause the other gears you are touching to spin. Usually not a problem, until you find a puzzle where you have to do things in a synchronized fashion – pain in the bum.

The mechanics of this game are fantastic – you are either working on a flat board, or a cube that you can rotate by tapping with two fingers and dragging. It really takes this type of puzzle game to the next level, making you keep tabs of ALL of the sides that you need to solve as well as making sure you do it in a timely and minimalistically as possible. The art is great – completely 3D and very well done graphics which ran smoothly on my 3GS.

I would do this naturally anyway!

If I could complain about anything, it’s the rather unimaginative achievements available on the Crystal platform, but that’s not really a fault to speak of. Speaking of which, and this doesn’t count toward the review, this was my first interaction with the Crystal social gaming platform. I have to say, it is incredibly polished and definitely a contender for OpenFeint and Plus+! Actually, there are only 10 puzzles available to you when you first purchase the game. That seems pretty short for a game like this, and that is a rather silly problem.

Overall, Cogs is a brilliant game – I’m still trying to finish all of the puzzles in Inventor mode, and then I’m going to run through Challenge mode and try to get this brain thinking again. There are no real shortcomings to speak of, it’s a load of fun that works your brain, it looks great, and the game mechanics work brilliantly. Unfortunate that you have to purchase the puzzles outside of the first 10 that they include, but definitely still gotta check it out.

Cogs is a groundbreaking puzzle game, where players build increasingly complex machines using sliding tiles in 2D and 3D environments. Multiple gameplay modes and difficulty levels are available. New puzzles are unlocked by building contraptions against the clock with as few moves as possible. This visually stunning and fantastic sounding game is perfect for puzzle fans of any age and ability!

And they even included a great gameplay trailer:

The game looks magnificent – maybe it’s just the inner Incredible Machines fanboy in me talking, but the game looks amazing. It looks like Pipe Dream and Incredible Machines had a love child, and the love child was dipped in holy water. We can’t wait to get our hands on it, and we’ll hopefully have a review up as soon as it comes out!