Netwalk (and Scrambled Net and KNetwalk)

I saw Netwalk from BEIKS arrive in the market late last week and thought it looked interesting. A day or two later I saw an update to Scrambled Net show up and thought it looked similar. Upon checking things out I learned Scrambled Net was a port of a Linux KDE game called KNetwalk which is mysteriously close to Netwalk in title. What's the deal?

Well, yes indeed... these are all the same basic game extending the old 'connect the plumbing' theme employed in such games as Pipeline and the Android game 'Milky Milky'. In the case of KNetwalk and its ports/knockoffs you're reconnecting a scrambled computer network. Tap on squares to rotate the connections until each computer is reattached to the server.

The only discernable difference I could see between Netwalk (pictured on the left) and Scrambled Net (pictured on the right) is that in Netwalk the server consumes two tile spaces instead of one. Both feature many levels... Netwalk says 100 and I can't find how many levels Scrambled Net (or its parent, KNetwalk, includes), but do know it sports 5 skill levels.

All in all I, ironically, found Scrambled Net to be the better of the two mainly because it scaled better to my Droid's screen resolution making clicking on a square easier. Netwalk's squares were a tad too small and thus I had several clicking errors while playing (and that's how you score... fewest clicks to solve a level, although just solving the puzzle itself is an accomplishment). The ironic part is that Netwalk costs $1.49 (despite their website saying $4.99) and Scrambled Net is free. From my angle I see no reason to buy Netwalk given that a quality, free game that seems a tad better is available in Scrambled Net.

[Update: Scrambled Net now costs $1.49 for the full version. Wonder how they came up with that price.]