Jenga for iPhone has great graphics, frustrating gameplay

Jenga. Jenga. J-J-J-Jenga. Now that you've got that Jenga song stuck in your head, you're ready for a review of Jenga on the iPhone.

The original Jenga was about as simple as games get. As the song goes, you take a block from the bottom, and you put it on top. Or, you can take a block from the middle, then put it on top. Once the tower of wooden blocks falls over, the game ends. When two or more players play, the one who caused the tower to topple is the loser.

The basic gameplay works exactly the same way on the iPhone, with graphics that seem almost excessively beautiful for a game of this type. But there's one very critical "gotcha" that made the game incredibly frustrating for me -- without any sort physical feedback, I found the game almost impossibly difficult compared to the real-world version of the game.

Read on to discover how Jenga proved to be both an unexpected delight and an exercise in frustration.

Graphics

It almost seems weirdly excessive for a game so simple, but Jenga features fully 3D graphics with an enormous amount of detail. Not only is the wood grain of the Jenga blocks themselves rendered to an almost photorealistic degree, the two available environments the game offers are graphically reminiscent of the spaces in Sony's Home service for the PlayStation 3. The graphics in Jenga were far beyond what I was expecting for what is at its heart a simple puzzler, but they do come with an unpleasant side effect: high battery drain. Roughly 90 minutes of gaming in Jenga drained my iPhone 4's battery by almost 90 percent.

These almost Zen-like spaces come at a heavy cost to battery life

Gameplay

The most important question to answer about Jenga is this: how does a game that relies so strongly on tactile feedback translate to the iPhone? Honestly, it doesn't work for me. Playing with actual wooden blocks lets you know right away how difficult it'll be to remove one from the tower, and when placing it on top you know immediately by feel if the tower's off balance. On the iPhone, Jenga is entirely touch-based (no trace of the iPhone 4 gyroscope functionality Steve Jobs showed off in a similar app at WWDC), but touching the blocks naturally gives you no more tactile feedback than any other iOS game.

Jenga for iPhone tries to compensate for this by giving you visual cues. When you tap on a block, the brackets which highlight it not only tell you the block is selected, the color also lets you know how difficult it'll be to withdraw the block (white is easy, pink is moderate, red is difficult). The tower sways ominously if you withdraw a block too quickly or if it's off balance, but visual cues alone aren't enough for a game like this. Without being able to feel the blocks as I withdrew them, there was a tremendous mental disconnect; it was almost as though I was playing a game of normal Jenga via closed-circuit camera. As a result, I found the gameplay tremendously frustrating.

This happens a lot

There are three different modes of play available in Jenga. Classic mode is single player and pretty much the same as playing Jenga with real blocks -- the game ends as soon as the tower topples. Pass 'n' play lets two to four players play in a "round robin" fashion. Arcade mode offers an innovative twist on the normal Jenga gameplay, with a timed mode and scoring with multipliers based on quick moves and stacking differently-colored blocks together. You can earn coins in this mode that allow you to purchase various power-ups, including one that lets you reverse the tower's collapse. Arcade mode has a lot of promise, but I never got the hang of the gameplay well enough to get much out of it.

To be fair, it's not a knock against the game's developers at all when I say the gameplay is frustrating. NaturalMotion has done its best to create an experience that surpasses the limitations of the hardware, so while the experience didn't work for me, it's exclusively because of the iPhone's interface lacking any tactile feedback.

Jenga includes Game Center integration, with leaderboards for both Classic and Arcade modes. However, like many recent games with Game Center, the leaderboards have been compromised somehow; the current record for Classic mode is 6,375 blocks, a humorously impossible score considering the game only has 54 blocks (the world record for a real-life Jenga tower is supposedly 40 2/3 blocks high). The in-game high scores have more integrity, with the current record standing at 33 blocks high.

Verdict

Jenga for iPhone has gorgeous graphics, but I just couldn't get my head around the dynamics of the gameplay. Having to rely entirely on visual cues for feedback meant I was never able to create a tower more than 24 blocks high before it toppled. This might just be my problem; Game Center cheaters and hackers aside, there's plenty of people who've managed to score much higher than I did. Despite the lack of tactile feedback, the game does have two distinct advantages over the real-world version of Jenga: it's far more portable, and it takes no time at all to set the tower back up after it falls.

Although I found the control scheme a bit of a pain, the gameplay is very addictive. I played Jenga nonstop for quite some time, and the only reason I stopped was because my iPhone's battery was nearly drained. The game is normally US$2.99, but it's currently on sale for $0.99 -- so if the game sounds even slightly interesting to you, I can still recommend it at $0.99 despite the weirdly disconnected feel of the controls. There's also an HD version for the iPad available for $4.99. Check out Jenga's unexpectedly spectacular graphics in the gallery below.

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