Flex your carpentry muscles and laugh in the face of physics in Wood Worker, airomagic's new stacking physics puzzler offering. Click and drag a variety of wooden pieces into position, figuring out the best way to pile them into a relatively stable design while also attempting to collect blue stars and avoid pesky red ones. In order to successfully complete a level, your design has to, well, stay level for five suspenseful seconds and utilize every building piece provided. While wooden pieces can be repositioned as many times as you'd like, metal ones can't be moved once in place and are not affected by gravity, allowing them to function like anchors to help keep your wobbly design standing. The occasionally provided nail can be hammered into a wooden piece of your choosing to turn it into an anchor as well.
New version is now up: disables the parallax background scrolling that a few of you complained about in the comments.
Wood Worker may seem simplistic in theory, but the puzzles are really quite clever. The extra element of building to avoid certain objects while being required to reach others really adds a level of difficulty to the game. The physics are graceful and forgiving, too, with each piece behaving as you'd expect it and moving slowly enough that there's time to prevent a disaster before it happens. An uncooperative piece can be dragged back to the top of the screen and will stay there until you decide you need it again, which is a nice feature in that it prevents that helpless feeling of watching everything you've worked so hard to achieve topple over after one misplaced piece, leaving you no choice but to sit there and weep. On top of that, the graphics are charming and even cute at times (the pause screen, for example), plus the music is perfectly suited to this type of game; catchy but never grating and, even after failing the most frustrating puzzle for the tenth time, I never went scrabbling for the mute button. All in all, Wood Worker is the perfect chance to redeem yourself for that failed wood shop class, but with fewer splinters!
Link goes to The Wok for me :)
[Whoops! The link should be fixed now! Thanks, guys. :) -Alex]
I like the idea, but the moving background triggers some kind of epileptic reaction for me. I've never before been subject to that kind of reaction. Quit around lvl 8.
Ok this seems like a super cool game that I would love. But that moving background makes me dizzy...
The background really is annoying. And the first 10 levels didn't really convince to play further, the only interesting thing was the nail.
Wow, yeah, that parallax scrolling is really dizzying. Bleurgh. I couldn't make it past level 2.
Moving background? it barely moves?! I really liked the game, can't believe it's getting such low scores.
Oh, this was fun. <3 Just enough challenge to be satisfying but not frustrating. (I think the only times I had to restart were when I accidentally threw a block off the top of the screen.) I'm definitely a fan of the forgiving physics and leisurely gravity, although the latter means that even an obviously toppling tower can still pass the five-second test.
Having multiple solutions was nice, too. A few levels get a lot easier when you realize that
you can nail a board in midair to stick it right on/under a blue star.
@stephan: Same here. I didn't even notice the background after the first few levels.
A new version is up that removes the background parallax scrolling.
Nice.. not too hard.
But having to drop objects on each order to rotate them (even if you weren't supposed to) was a bit tiring, a simple rotate 90 would've been better. Although it added to the difficulty on some levels. :)
Update