CONNECTION ROAD

Main review

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend and Meg, the female lead of the soap opera-sounding Connection Road, will go through quite a bit of grief in order to collect them! She must collect all three diamonds on a stage to progress to the next, but actually getting to those diamonds will require a degree of lateral thinking and possibly a little plumbing work as well so it’s a good job she’s brought a spanner with her!

The controls take a little getting used to but are simple enough, joystick or cursor keys on their own guide Meg around the screen in one “cell” steps, holding fire or Z and then moving allows her to grab certain objects and either push or pull them around and, since she needs to be pointing directly towards something in order to manipulate it, holding fire, Z or X and pushing the joystick allows her to turn on the spot.

MOVING IN, MAKING MY CONNECTION

So whilst it might initially appear like it could have been set in a warehouse to begin with, the extra twist to the controls of being able to pull as well as push objects around and walk through others as tunnels to traverse hazards makes for a very different feel to the gameplay. There’s no need to think ahead to avoid pushing something up against a wall where it can’t be retrieved (as happens every so often to even the most seasoned Sokoban player) and in theory at least just about any sequence of moves can be reversed so the level restart option shouldn’t be required, but that new found freedom of object movement still doesn’t make solving the game’s puzzles any easier.

On the presentation front, the entire game could probably be described as cute; the graphics are colourful and clear so there’s never any confusion over what specific tiles do within a level once their properties have been divined. The music is probably best described as jolly (although it does border on both the lift music and slightly irritating camps occasionally, especially since there are only two in-game tunes) and the sound effects are more subtle than anything else, occasionally to the point where they won’t even be noticed behind the more excitable parts of the tunes.

Connection Road plays at a very leisurely pace, there isn’t a timer ticking away to add tension, there are no mobile enemies, the controls simply won’t allow Meg to fall into the hazards she’s meant to be circumventing and, whilst the number of moves taken on a stage is counted to see if the current record has been broken, the game won’t because too many steps have been taken. Although it’s significantly different to Sokoban to actually play, Connection Road does offer similar levels of challenge and indeed equipment-thumping frustration that regular warehouse workers should enjoy quite a bit.