A tribe of little furballs lives happily in the forest, when all of a sudden an evil wizard kidnaps their princess!  Now the little furries must enter the wizard’s stronghold and save the day in The Brave Furries, a downloadable puzzle game for iOS devices and Google Play (reviewed on iPad here).  I’m not sure how making colored fuzzballs hop into similar colored glowing spheres arranged in a spider web grid will save a princess, but oh well.  This puzzler is like a modern take on those ‘jump-a-peg’ games, you know, like the ones you can play at Cracker Barrel while you wait for your food.

Gameplay is pretty simple, but kind of hard to explain in words, but here goes.  Colored spheres are arranged on a grid made up of spider webs.  The furries wait at the edge of the grid, and you must tap on them to make them hop to spheres of the same color.  The furries can only hop to the farthest reaching sphere of their color, but they can’t jump over other furries, so you have to think ahead to keep them from blocking others.  Later you’ll be able to place special orange furries on spheres to help keep other ones from hopping too far and also to fill any empty spaces.  Once all furries are on a sphere, you win the level.  Some levels are timed while others are not.  The game doesn’t give explicit instructions, but it’s pretty easy to figure out just by playing for a bit.

To access these levels, you’ll view a room in the wizard’s fortress, and you must find and tap glowing runes to start levels.  Collect enough glowing runes by completing levels and you’ll be able to move onto the next room.  Soon after you start playing, you’ll discover that in order to play these levels, you’ll need to have enough of these little glowing firefly things.  Luckily these glowing things are easy to get.  You can tap on them floating around the rooms, by finishing levels, and earning them by playing mini-games.  The mini-games have to charge up over time, though.  You’ll also earn purple gems every so often, and you can use the fireflies and gems to buy other helpful tricks like more time in the levels, or more chances if you miss.  Or you can always buy them with the in-game shop.  That’s really the only thing that annoys me about this game is how they handle in-game purchases, but it’s like how many other tablet games are, unfortunately.  Other than that, this is a pretty simple and addicting puzzler.

Kid Factor:

No violence that I could find.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, but the game is easy enough to figure out just by playing.  Younger gamers may have trouble with the harder, later levels, though.  And keep in mind that The Brave Furries has in-game purchases, so supervision is recommended with that.  But this game could be considered educational as it teaches logic and thinking skills.

Tags: Game Reviews