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Principia gameplay review: a physics puzzle that keeps you challenged

By Daniel Petrov

Updated: Dec 29, 2013, 1:15 PM

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Android Games

Principia gameplay review: a physics puzzle that keeps you challenged

Developer: Bithack	Platforms: Android
Genre: Physics puzzle	Price: $3.59

Games like Cut The Rope or Where's My Water opened the floodgates of inventive puzzle game titles that are a breath of fresh air amongst shooters and racers. Also, let's face it, shoot-'em-up and racing games are much more fun on a large display, rather than on a mobile device. Unlike physics puzzles. Principia is one of the more complex such titles that came out recently, with the promise to keep our mind bent for endless hours. Is it so?

Save the robot

Written by the same Bithack devs that did Apparatus, the $3.59 Principia follows in its footsteps by requiring you to build perplexing machinery, using a wide variety of tools and elements. You can satisfy your architectural calling by designing towers or bridges, or your engineering cravings by making cars or rockets, with the help of no less than 150 puzzle pieces. Some say the sheer quantity of elements you can use make the game too complex, but that's the whole point, we'd argue, as there's more than one way to skin a cat here, and in fact the number of combinations you can use is mind-boggling.

The basic premise is to lead a robot (no, not the green one) to an extraction point, and the tools and contraptions you must slap together in order to do this, will certainly challenge your imagination. You start small with the puzzle challenges, trying to guide the robot using planks, waypoints, trampolines and other paraphernalia. Sometimes you have to guide more than one robot, and they all go in different directions, encountering various dangers on the way you have to circumvent.

Fan-built adventures

The more you go further, the more demanding this game becomes, letting you build electronics like calculators or even other robots, in order to complete the task. There is an adventure mode, too, that lets you destroy things like an elephant in a souvenir store when the levels line up against you. In addition, Principia has a great community at the source link below, where you can preview and install people's homebrew adventures, and give them your thumbs up for ingenuity, ensuring much more game time than the developers planned originally.

If you want a challenging mobile game that will keep you always thinking, Principia will fit that need, and then some. The ever-increasing complexity of tasks, and the mind-boggling variety of solutions to finish them ensure that you won't get bored for a second during gameplay, and might even get frustrated a time or two, but that goes with the territory of a great gameplay.

Pros

A vast amount of tools and puzzle pieces
Challenging gameplay
Downloadable adventures

Cons

Glitchy, somewhat basic graphics
Some levels can get overly frustrating

PhoneArena rating:

Developer: Bithack	Platforms: Android
Genre: Physics puzzle	Price: $3.59

Adventures screenshots courtesy of Principiagame.com

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Daniel, a devoted tech writer at PhoneArena since 2010, has been engrossed in mobile technology since the Windows Mobile era. His expertise spans mobile hardware, software, and carrier networks, and he's keenly interested in the future of digital health, car connectivity, and 5G. Beyond his professional pursuits, Daniel finds balance in travel, reading, and exploring new tech innovations, while contemplating the ethical and privacy implications of our digital future.

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Principia gameplay review: a physics puzzle that keeps you challenged

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