First Look: Witch's Workshop

I'm addicted to Diner Dash, and I greatly enjoy other time management games. The basic gist of a lot of these is that you're given a setting and you must complete a task (usually fulfilling an order for a customer) in a certain amount of time before the customer gets angry and leaves. As time goes by, the tasks either become more complex or your time speeds up.

Witch's Workshop[link opens iTunes] is a new game for the iPhone from Spark Plug Games that combines the best aspects of Diner Dash with Bejeweled. Your task is to fill potion bottles for your customer by swapping the various potions around on the screen until they form a horizontal or vertical line of three or more potions. The same-colored potions then fill the bottle and you drag the full bottle over to the customer. A small dragon is placed in the bottom right corner and can be charged up and used to help fill orders. As time goes by, the customers become more and more impatient and more potion is needed to fill the bottles, so it becomes quite challenging.

Game play fluctuated between very smooth and some of the potion bottles being hard to drag -- but I'm betting on that being more operator error than a flaw in the game. Graphics are simple, but clear and well-executed for what is needed with the game. Various options include the ability to toggle hints when you get stuck.

There's also some nifty tricks. During the course of the game, I managed to get something called a Cauldron Crash and had to shake the iPhone to unstick it. Then, I happened to turn the phone onto its side. I heard the sound of glasses hitting each other and noticed that the potions themselves had swapped into the horizontal position, but the rest of the game remained vertical. It made for an interesting screenshot, as seen in the gallery.

Witch's Workshop is currently available for $1.99 through the App Store.

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