Occasionally, I’ll dip my toe into a casual puzzle game, and Borbs enticed me in because it felt like an interesting mix of casual puzzling and birds! There is a simple premise, fairly well executed here, but its concept is also very narrow and specific. I feel like Borbs is a great game for new gamers or youngsters starting out with puzzle games. Beyond that audience, I struggle to know who’d play Borbs beyond the need for a quick five-minute brain scratch on a work commute.
Borbs has billions of levels that start out as empty grids with a few Borb blocks placed inside them. Borb blocks are like the tetronominos in Tetris, but each block is a Borb. Borbs are based on birds, and each borb comes with a photo and sound clip of the bird that inspired its artwork. Each block can be anywhere from one to ten blocks in size, and they come in lots of different shapes. The idea is to fit all the blocks into the grid perfectly with no gaps or overlap. Place a block incorrectly three times in a level, and you’ll get a game over. Survive a run (the background takes you from the ground into space as you complete levels), and you’ll unlock a new Borb to be added to your set.
The key gameplay mechanic is that blocks can be rotated or flipped. If it’s an L-shaped block, it must fit that slot. That means the potential solutions available for each level are quite limited, as long as you have a spatial mind to visualise where to place the blocks. This makes it an easy game to pick up and understand, but as the game never progresses beyond this idea, there’s no ceiling of difficulty that the game can progress to. Borbs boasts of 2 billion level combinations, but you’ll be doing the exact same thing without much (if any) complexity jump every time. I feel like the emphasis on level numbers over gameplay mechanics means that Borbs burns out its enjoyment very quickly, leaving the player bored and disengaged quite quickly. There are leaderboards for daily, weekly, and all-time scores, but they are more an act of perseverance than skill. Combos carry over from run to run. I hadn’t made a mistake for three runs, making a combo in the 300s, and I had to quit the game just to take a break. The scoring doesn’t feel like it relates to the actual game mode itself and is misleading.
There’s a nice, simple idea here, but it’s almost so basic and simple that it’s difficult to recommend beyond being an easy onboarding game for new gamers or a commute time-waster. Borbs needed some kind of gameplay mechanic progression to justify the time investment, and it doesn’t have it. A missed opportunity.
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