Burn it All – iPad Game Review

By Juli | May 6, 2011 | 3 comments

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Burn it All – Journey to the Sun is a clever puzzle game that will suck you in for hours at a time with its charming graphics and creative level design. I’ll be honest – I sat and played this game for nearly three hours straight when I first downloaded it, and while I got through most of the levels, there’s still hours upon hours of achievements and high scores for me to go back to.

This is a time-based challenge game where the goal is to guide your little flame as it burns up everything in each level in the quickest and most efficient way. Your flame will burn through various configurations of ropes, wood, and bats, while trying to avoid things like water drops and air jets.

When you start the game, you begin with a series of ropes and your burning companion resting in the lower right corner. It’s your job to drag him with your finger on to the ends of the ropes in order to set them on fire. Everything in the stage has to burn before the timer runs out, and the faster you clear the stage, the higher the score. You also get between zero and three diamonds for each completed level, with three being rewarded for the quickest infernos. The flame you begin with, the red flame, can only burn one thing at a time. Once you’ve lit a rope on fire, he returns to his corner to recharge and you have to quickly drag him to the next rope. The recharging is a key element of gameplay, as it causes you to carefully choose your moves. You can’t move too quickly or too slowly, which can be both exciting and frustrating. Burning and recharging is the general basis of the entire game.

It sounds simple, and it is. I was able to progress through the levels with little problem, but the real skill challenge came with trying to get the maximum number of diamonds. The puzzles require a lot of thought and planning to execute perfectly. During gameplay, there are two other types of flames – blue and green – which both have additional abilities and restrictions. There are also three kinds of rope and various wooden obstacles to burn, plus bats to “hug.” That’s right, the goal is to drag your fiery little minion to hug bats, which very unfortunately sets them on fire. During your quest to wreak havoc, there are a few obstacles to navigate. Water droplets will quench your flame if you touch them and air jets can be beneficial or harmful, so there’s a lot of experimentation to be had.

There are a total of four different worlds at this time, each with 25 levels, and a new, fifth world in development. As you progress through the worlds, the difficulty ramps up and you’re given new abilities at the perfect intervals. Burn It All never gets stagnant because there’s always something new going on. For example, during the fourth world, there’s a new time warp event. First you play through as the red flame, then shift back in time to play through with the blue flame. While you’re controlling the blue flame, the red flame is running through the actions that you previously played – so you’ve got two flames burning things at once. It sounds complicated, and it is – this can definitely be tough to master because it’s important to coordinate what you burned with the red flame and what you need to focus on first with the blue flame. However, it’s a really unique element of gameplay that I found to be engrossing and fun.

The game includes all kinds of score sharing options. You can connect it to Facebook and share your achievements at any time, plus it supports Game Center and Open Feint, which provides a lot of replay value for those of you who like to get the best score and all of the achievements.

What I liked: The ability to skip a level. It’s the worst when you’re stuck in a particular level of a puzzle game with no way to progress, but that’s not the case here. You can finish other levels of a world and then go back to beat the ones you were having trouble with.

What I didn’t like: It continually asked me if I wanted to rate the game, while threatening to burn poor little kittens if I didn’t. I wished there was a way to disable the popups, especially after I had already declined twice.

To buy or not to buy: Definitely. This is a great game for playing in short stretches of time, waiting in line or on a break at work. Gameplay is challenging but never frustrating and it’s definitely a game I’ll come back to. For a mere $0.99, it’s worth checking out.