I don’t know a kid alive that didn’t love the board game Mouse Trap. Watching the seemingly random elements lead to trapping someone’s mouse is mysteriously cool. This Rube-Goldberg-machine-premise spills over to Crazy Machines Elements, a game that dares you to complete machines crazier than anything Mouse Trap has to offer. While it can be frustratingly difficult, it’s a puzzler that’s worth looking into.
Crazy Machines Elements has 3 main modes, but the meat of it is in the Puzzle Mode. You’re given a handful of parts which somehow finish a partially completed Rube Goldberg machine. It’s your job to figure out where they go. Parts can range from the mundane (gears and drive belts) to the insane (weather generators and UFOs). The 100 puzzles are divided into 10 chapters which become increasingly complicated and require more unconventional thinking. The game doesn’t feature much in terms of tutorials – it drops into the deep end and trusts your intelligence to do the rest. Since the puzzles are physics-based, you can come up with some clever solutions that were probably not originally intended. I solved puzzles on more than one occasion with several pieces left over. It still got the job done though! Each stage has several golden hex nuts scattered throughout, and the only the best solutions will lead to capturing each one. The game’s payoff is deducing the perfect placement, and it feels good every time you solve a puzzle with each hex nut collected. But as I mentioned earlier, this game gets extremely difficult so while it makes the endorphin payoff that much higher, it equally raises the frustration levels.
Occasionally, you will come across a puzzle that’s more trial-and-error than logic. They devolve into finding the perfect part placement, retesting the solution, replacing the piece, retesting, to ad nauseum. It totally kills the momentum. These are not common experiences, but when it happened, I wanted to set the controller down just so I wouldn’t have an aneurism.
If you can manage to solve 50 of the puzzles, you unlock Challenge Mode which lives up to its namesake completely. The approach here is different – each puzzle gives you an objective and an almost-empty level to make it happen. You’re given $20,000 to purchase almost any piece available, so your brain is free to concoct all sorts of machines. Best of all, these puzzles are ranked online with leaderboards showing how fast and how cheaply players solved them. It’s a pretty rewarding addition to the game, as it puts your creativity to the test along with the logic skills picked up from Puzzle mode.
Crazy Machines Elements also has an Editor mode, but it’s been excessively neutered. You can choose your preferred background, along with time of day, and $20,000 worth of parts for your puzzle. The game allows you to store up to 10 of your crafted puzzles, which isn’t very generous. Even worse, there’s no way to share your levels online. It really killed my ambition to make a level, as no one would ever see it. It’s clear the developers wanted to sell extra levels as DLC (which are already available), instead of letting the community foster and grow. It’s a shame, as I can’t imagine the sales from DLC would match a stronger fan-base for future releases.
Visually, the game is competent, with frame-rate sometimes dipping very low when lots of particle effects fill the screen. It’s clearly a result of poor optimization. Crazy Machines was originally a PC-only franchise, and the transition from mouse to controller isn’t perfect. It’s workable, but for the puzzles that require pin-point accuracy, it’s a difficult struggle to get the analog to settle just so. Beyond those situations, the controller works well enough.
Crazy Machines Elements is an enjoyable, if not difficult, puzzler. It taxes your brain to think outside the box, and you’ll feel like a genius for it. The Challenge mode really gives the game some legs, as it adds a creative and competitive element to what would otherwise be a dry affair. If the Editor mode weren’t so stripped down, this game would truly shine. As it stands, Crazy Machines Elements is a neat title (and surprisingly fun to play collaboratively), but falls short of greatness.
Pros:
- Inventive puzzles
- Challenge mode adds much-needed variety
- Plenty of included puzzles – dozens of hours to solve them all
- Consistent physics
- Around 130 different parts to play with in Editor mode
- Great game to play collaboratively
Cons:
- Occasional graphical slowdown
- Some puzzles stress trial-and-error over inventive solutions
- Editor mode doesn’t allow online sharing
- Analog controls could be more precise
