Tired of slinging Angry Birds? Then perhaps you'll like the newest mobile franchise from Rovio, the best-selling game's creator. Amazing Alex is another physics-centric puzzle stumper, and takes you inside the mind of a young boy (Alex) who lives in a messy house. Alex arranges household items in creative Mouse Trap-like ways using a plethora of blocks, ramps, skateboards, toy trucks, and spring-loaded boxing gloves; each level's goal is to manipulate these elements to move a given object from point A to point B. (Watch a trailer below.) The game is available for 99 cents on both Android and iOS smartphones. Rovio's Angry Birds franchise has already been downloaded more than a billion times, and singlehandedly turned the Finnish game developer into an industry powerhouse. Could Amazing Alex possibly live up to its pig-slaying predecessor's overwhelming success?
It's good solid fun: The premise, says Matt Peckham at TIME, in which a brainy kid "does battle with Rube Goldberg machines," is a "cool idea." And once you take "the training wheels off" and get past the first eight levels of "surprisingly bland tutorials," you'll find that the game supplies a steady dose of charming, creative fun. Unlike Angry Birds, you won't be able to "hand Amazing Alex off to your 6-your-old niece" and teach her to play in a few seconds. But "it's diverting enough if you're in the mood for a set-and-run puzzler."
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