Review – Treemaker – Yet Another Physics Puzzler

What Treemaker lacks in variety, it doesn’t make up for anywhere else in gameplay or design. It’s a pretty enough game, and the reason I initially downloaded it to my Galaxy Nexus. After playing eight or so levels, you’ll quickly start asking yourself, “Why am I still playing this game?”

Treemaker is another physics-based puzzler. You’re tasked with collecting seeds. I think they’re seeds. Whenever you collect one, a tree grows in its place — thus the name, Treemaker. There’s no story offered behind the game, no reason given why you’d want to grow trees on strange platforms. You just do.

To collect these seeds, you toss out tendrils from platform to platform, swinging about Spider-man-style. There are only two obstacles to level completion. The first, to avoid falling off platforms. The second, to avoid the coloured platforms (red initially, then blue, and yellow later), which fry your little seed hunter the moment they are touched.

That’s it. There are 24 levels which ask you to do the same thing over and over. The arrangement of the platforms change level to level, but the obstacles remain the same. Nothing new is introduced into the game beyond what you see in the first eight levels. That is a problem, because Treemaker quickly becomes an exercise in the repetitive.

If this game were Cut The Rope, all the game would consist of would be candy on strings and the odd electrical field to avoid. Cut The Rope, which is another physics based puzzler involving swinging mechanics, offers up new challenges and obstacles continually, which is what makes it a great game. Treemaker becomes monotonous and boring rather quickly.

Due to the limited nature of the challenges in Treemaker, there’s little in the way of replayabilty. Heck, after you’ve played 8 or 9 levels, there’s little motivation to continue through all 24 levels.

Another annoying aspect of the game is the music. There is no option to turn it off. The music runs on a very short loop, which makes listening to it quite tedious in short order.

Treemaker is a free game. The advertising is well-placed and it doesn’t impact game play. That’s the most positive thing I can say about the game. As a freebie, is it worth a download? Not really.

Available for Android and iOS.