THE STORY

Thanks to Professor Brian Cox from D:ream, Professor Stephen Hawking from The Simpsons, and Doctor Brian May from Queen, physics has never been cooler. Take the phenomenal success of Angry Birds and Where’s My Water? for excellent example. And now welcome too to Amazing Alex, a school-age science nerd who’s cooler than a cryogenic cucumber…

THE EXPERIENCE

The first thing you need to know about Amazing Alex is that it’s a physics-based puzzler from the same stable as Angry Birds. And that’s probably all you need to know, but as I get paid to write far more you’d better stick with me. So, utilising the laws of gravity to suit his own ends, inventive Alex makes use of the things he finds around him to solve all manner of movement-based messes.

Puzzles range from the surprisingly simplistic to the deviously difficult, but most rely on you having a basic grasp of momentum and energy transference or, to cut the geek babble, using one object to knock another one to drop through a pipe to trigger a spring-loaded boxing glove to punch some boxes. If you can master that then the rest is a mere matter of working out where everything needs to be positioned for the desired outcome.

Tidily animated, Amazing Alex may not have all the cartoon camp of his furious fowl sibling, but what it has instead is utterly immersive, often infuriating but always inventive level variation.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Despite being a reworking of Casey’s Contraptions by Snappy Touch and Mystery Coconut, Rovio has worked its magic yet again to produce an app that’s as fresh and frustrating as Angry Birds. However, lacking the pure entertainment value of firing birds at pigs, whilst success is assured, it’s hard to imagine Alex flying quite as highly, Amazing or not.

Additional information

Current version: 1.0.0
Requires Android 1.6 and up

Download the Amazing Alex app from Google Play

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