City of Secrets Skyline is a spatial reasoning puzzle game that will appeal to those of you who love logic games like Sudoku and Kenken. It’s based in the world of City of Secrets, which is Aidem Media’s adventure puzzle game.
The goal in Skyline is to place all of your houses on the game board. Houses range from one to four levels, and like in Sudoku, no line (both horizontal and vertical) can occupy two houses with the same number of floors.
In each puzzle, you will have numerical hints, such as a two or a three, which signify how many buildings should be visible from that location when looking straight ahead. Larger houses block smaller houses, and an extra tile, the park, doesn’t count as a building at all.
So, for example, if you’ve got a row of three, with a two in front of it, you can solve that row by placing a one story house in front of a three story house (leaving two buildings visible and the two story house hidden) or a two story house in front of a three story house (leaving the one story house hidden). This sounds complicated, and it does have a bit of a learning curve, but once you get into the game, you’ll pick it up pretty quickly.
The game has four different difficulty levels, and the toughness ramps up considerably as you progress. There are five hints available if you get completely stuck, and more can be purchased in-app at any time.
Graphically, the game looks great, and it is in 2D, but fully rotatable so that you can clearly see the houses from every position. Game tiles are placed and removed by tapping, and there’s a function to clear the entire board. All in all, the interface is well done, so you can focus on the gameplay.
I had fun with this puzzle game, and I expect that anyone who loves number based logic puzzles will enjoy City of Secrets Skyline HD.
What I liked: Once I figured out how to play, I really enjoyed the puzzles, which required some serious thought, but were never too hard to complete.
What I didn’t like: This game was a bit tough to grasp, even with the in-game instructions. I think it could benefit immensely from a few tutorial levels. I’d also like to see an undo button, because I found tapping to remove buildings to be tedious when I needed to remove more than one. I also found that I wasn’t able to save my levels mid-game, and it was frustrating having to restart every time that I exited and opened another app.
To buy or not to buy: This is a well done puzzle game. It’s challenging, addictive, and worth purchasing.
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