Agent 351: Logic Bomb
Score: 70% ESRB: 4+ Publisher: Architeq New Media Entertainment Developer: Architeq New Media Entertainment Media: Download/1 Players: 1 Genre: Trivia
Graphics & Sound: The cut scenes in Agent 351: Logic Bomb are cartoons, done mostly in shades of grey. You play as Agent 351, a dog who wears suits and walks around on two legs, as do all of the other characters in the game. They all have heavy British accents and 351 enjoys greeting his supervisor, G (which is no doubt a nod to Bond's "M"), by saying, "What up, G?" although she is never amused by this. Aside from cut scenes, the aesthetic is limited to somewhat static scenes of Agent 351 thinking in frustration as you work on trivia questions, then smiling in glee when you get them right. If you screw up, he displays his disgust. One of the most annoying attributes is his dialogue during the game as he says things like "Oh, come on!" when you get one wrong and "Time's up" continuously, whether you are close to being out of time or not. You'll get a "ding" if you correctly answer a question and a nasty buzzer if you get one wrong. The background music is fairly frenetic and bears a resemblance to other spy franchises like Mission Impossible. It was so annoying to Geck0 that he asked me to mute it while I was playing next to him. While I didn't find it quite as frustrating, it definitely didn't add to the experience.
Gameplay: In Agent 351: Logic Bomb, you play Agent 351, out to stop Jacques Le Petit, a bank robber and explosives expert. Le Petit has set up bombs throughout the Treasury Building and the bombs can only be defused by selecting the right answer in a trivia question. Since you were a trivia whiz in college, G selects you for the job. You will work your way through the levels, with minimal cut scenes between them describing your progress and what Le Petit has done or is doing. Then you will be shown a trivia question with 4 possible choices for answers. If you select an incorrect answer, Agent 351 will look at you in disgust. Wrong answers take time away and too many wrong answers spell doom, which means you restart the level. There are a total of 8 levels with 5 rounds comprising each level. Each round contains 5 questions that you must answer correctly to progress to the next round. My main problem with Agent 351 is the fact that, not only are the questions a bit odd, but they are constantly recycled throughout the levels and they don't seem to scale up in difficulty. In other words, you are just as likely to get a particular question in Level 1, Round 1 as you are in Level 4, Round 4. Not cool.
Difficulty: Agent 351: Logic Bomb gives you a choice between playing on Easy, which gives you 30 seconds per round, Medium, where you get 20 seconds, and Hard, where you only have 10 seconds per round. Although I found some of the questions to be somewhat obscure, if you play long enough, you'll get the opportunity to choose each of the four answers to eventually figure out which one is correct. I didn't find that the game was teaching me the answers, because they never tell you what the correct answer is. Sure, you can eventually use the process of elimination to obtain it, but I just didn't like the way it was handled.
Game Mechanics: Well, Agent 351: Logic Bomb is a trivia game and, as such, all you'll have to do is tap to select answers. However, one thing that was distracting to me was when I'd answer a series of 5 questions correctly, only to have another trivia question come up, but then have the game immediately jump to the level menu, indicating you had made it to the next round. It just seemed a bit slipshod, and I would have preferred that the game fade to the menu rather than briefly show me the next question, only to jarringly jump to a menu. As an assist in your quest, you do have a 50/50 button and a Pause button. Once per round, you can use the 50/50 button to eliminate two of the four answer options. You can also pause the game by hitting the Pause button, but you can only pause the game twice per game and its just as easy to hit the button to escape out of the game altogether since it holds your place. Although Agent 351: Logic Bomb is an iPhone game and works just fine on the iPhone, I also played it on the iPad 2 and it scaled up very nicely. Should you have both devices, you have the option of using it on either and it works just fine. That being said, I just didn't find Logic Bomb to be very much fun. Although I typically really enjoy trivia, I found a number of the questions to be a bit abstract and I don't enjoy learning by being hammered by the same questions over and over. I know that the developers were trying to do something clever with the game and I did learn what the term "logic bomb" means (essentially, malicious code inserted into a program), I just wasn't a big fan.
-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins
Related Links: Agent 351: Logic Bomb | iTunes Page
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