iPhone app reviews: Alchemy

Alchemy is a puzzle game for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch which requires players to use their logic and luck to experiment with elements, combining them and creating brand new elements and life forms. The end goal of all this is to combine elements to create gold. It was released by Denis Butyletskiy and is currently free to download.

The player starts off with four elements: Water, Fire, Air and Soil. Players tap one of these and it will appear on the bottom part of the screen. The player can then tap another element and this will appear along side. Then if one is dragged on top of the other the two will combine to form a brand new element, which will then appear on the list at the top. Some elements however are not combinable and there will be an error noise if the player tries to combine them. The game requires the player to use logic and luck to combine the elements in different combinations to form 211 different elements.

Alchemy is very original and a great concept but there are some problems with the game. To access the new elements the player must scroll across the top of the screen, which when there are over a hundred elements becomes tedious and annoying. There is also not enough space to store more than 5 or 6 elements of the screen at any time. Some of the elements are slightly unintuitive such as “Fire” + “Life” = “Fire Golem”, this means logic cannot always be used. A list of the elements created so far would be very useful and possibly a tip system in the form of a riddle would make the game more interesting than simply constant code breaking by trying one element with every other available one.

On the bright side, the game is very creative and original and does take a lot of thought by players. The layout is simple to understand and use. The game will keep players busy for a long time and is being updated with more elements as time goes by. Alchemy allows the player to play God and create new starting blocks for life, as well as inventing some along the way. The game also allows players to suggest future elements and combinations meaning the game will become more puzzling with each update. The game is free and is worth a download just to experience this new type of puzzle game.