If you’re looking for a unique puzzle game that will actually challenge you and kill hours of your time, then Shatterquest 3D is definitely the app for you. With beautiful graphics, great sound and music and challenging puzzles, the game is well made. However, the difficult controls take away some of the fun.

Each world you encounter is presented as a beautiful 3D environment of bricks and glass. Each piece of glass is colored and breakable. You’ll need to break through these glass walls in order to solve puzzles and travel to different rooms. The main focus of the game is a small orb that constantly bounces up and down. This ball can change color and break through those glass walls. However, in order to break through, the wall and the orb need to be the same color. You can change the orb’s color using several color changing stations found throughout the level. To win, you need to find all of the different colored stars locked away in breakable glass boxes. The puzzles can be as simple as having to go back and forth to change the orb’s color and knock down certain colored walls. Or, they can be as complex as trying to figure out a certain combination of blocks to hit.

Controlling your orb is easier said than done. There are a few options for control, including using the accelerometer, but the easiest is to use the arrows found at the bottom of the screen. You can hold your device in portrait or landscape mode to move around the level. While motionless, your orb will automatically bounce up and down from floor to ceiling. You can touch the forward arrow on the right side or the backward arrow on the left side to move. Sliding your finger on the screen will turn your viewpoint and change the direction the ball will travel in. If you don’t touch the screen, the camera will constantly follow the orb’s bouncing motion, which can get a bit nauseating at first. If you hold your finger on the screen, the camera will stay in a stationary position. These controls will take a great deal of practice before you get used to them. I don’t understand why a virtual thumb stick couldn’t have been used here. It would have made things much easier.

If you can survive the nausea and horrible controls, the game will actually start to become fun to play. You get points for simply breaking any glass you see throughout the level. Sometimes there will be something inside a glass box, such as an extra life, or a star that is required to win the level. It becomes addicting, always wanting to see what’s on the other side of the wall you need to break through. You’ll feel compelled to get to the next puzzle just to see what it is. It would be a definite winner if it weren’t for the poor control scheme. However, regardless of the controls, Shatterquest 3D is still a unique and fun puzzle game that I highly recommend checking out.