ParkingBreak

ParkingBreak is another mobile clone of Rush Hour. For those unfamiliar, Rush Hour is an excellent puzzle game from ThinkFun where you have a parking lot of cars and trucks and a red car that needs to be moved out of the lot. Each vehicle can either be moved horizontally or vertically. Your goal is to move all of the others cars in order to clear a path for the red car to get out of the parking lot. The simple puzzles are quite easy and are good confidence builders, but later in the game you'll need to resort to excellent logic skills in order to solve the puzzles. Once you do that there's a family of games such as Rush Hour Deluxe you can purchase and each comes with a nice set of plastic cars, puzzles, and solutions, but this isn't about the board game...

ParkingBreak brings this game to the Android, but ads the addition of a score. For each level you'll be paid $500, $1000, ...etc based on its difficulty, but then every move costs you $10. Personally, coming from playing Rush Hour I ignored the scoring and simply focused on solving the puzzles.

ParkingBreak is among the prettiest Rush Hour clones and at $2.99 it should be. Most other Rush Hour clones I've played have been free, but I don't knock a company that's willing to do a good job for charging money. I just think $2.99 might be a bit steep for this game.

Another interesting point is that in addition to a demo and Android version there's also a Droid specific version that takes advantage of the Droid's odd screen size. Now, I'm all in favor of developer's forgetting about those extra 54 pixels and treating my display as a WVGA display so as to simplify porting... I've never really understand why the Droid has such a weird screen size. However, with two full versions one question I have is "If I buy the Android version and upgrade to the Droid are we saying I have to buy this again?". I sure hope not.

I did have one problem with this game and that's in between levels it would seem to hang on the loading next level screen. I could always press Home and then start the game again and all would be well with no lost progress, but there's some sort of glitch there. There's also a marketplace report of level 24 causing it to crash? I've only made it to level 22 so I'll have to follow up on that if it turns out to be true.

ParkingBreak is a cute looking, well polished adaptation of a fun puzzle game and I'd certainly welcome the extra effort the developers took with this title in several other titles where the game is fun, but not as sharp looking. I'm pleased with my purchase and would recommend this game to others that enjoy this type of app.