Hot on the heels of Sumoo, developer MindLabor returns with Boltz. It’s another minimalist puzzle game aimed at the $2/£2 or less bracket, but with Sumoo barely cooling down after my uninstallation upon completion, has Boltz had enough time in the oven to offer a comparable slice of brain-tingling fun? The answer, for me, is no.
Boltz is slightly misnamed, as the game focuses on nuts and bolts. Each level has a selection of bolts with various nuts attached. Select a nut, and it’ll screw or unscrew endlessly until it can be removed from the board or it hits another nut or bolt. If it hits something, the nut turns tail and can be screwed the other way endlessly until the same thing happens. Each level is a maze of nuts and bolts, and the initial levels focus on working out the order of unscrewing nuts to remove them from the board. When a bolt has no more nuts left, the bolt is removed, and that may open up new options for removal. Only orange coloured “targets” matter to win a level.
Very quickly, Boltz adds breakable nuts, which are always targets, that smash when another nut hits them. This ends up becoming the focus of the title, as you’ll need to work out the order of what to break so that nut or bolt doesn’t get stranded. Late game adds in co-joined bolts that trigger multiple bolts to move at the same time, but it feels more like a visual effect to induce dopamine from lots of smashing, rather than feeling puzzle-oriented. The issue with this is that across the 40 levels (half of Sumoo), the level design rarely feels clever or complex. It is quite obvious 95% of the time what can be moved next, and adding more nuts and bolts just makes the same level designs longer.
I completed Boltz in 32 minutes. I didn’t feel challenged, and whilst there is a satisfying element to cleaning up the nuts and bolts, most levels leave something behind, so that wasn’t fully satisfying either. Boltz stalls out early on its concept, and whilst there are undo and restart buttons, and the game runs well, its basic premise never develops, and so I struggled to enjoy myself. What Boltz needed was some level variety and another mechanic or two to break up the monotony of tidying things up. I can only recommend Boltz for fans of very casual puzzle games on a tight budget. Even then, MindLabor themselves have better options. A shame.
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