Wood Screw 4+

When you’re playing the game, is fantastic. It really challenges you and causes you to think about the order to remove things in. I truly enjoy it. That’s the good part. The incredibly sucky part is that as you progress, and just as you start getting the hang of the game and really start getting challenged, you’re forced to watch these increasingly longer and longer and dumber and dumber ads. I know this is not the only game that is afflicted with this. I’m not against watching the occasional ad or short ads in between games. I know we all have bills to pay and we need to make money. But ads that are running up to a minute just feel unreasonable, especially if you’re like me who plays these types of games when I have the occasional 15 minute break. I would gladly watch a one minute ad at the very beginning of a gameplay session or 20 second ad in between each round. As of right now, I actually went ahead and uninstalled it. There must be some happy medium. Is there an ad free version I can pay for?

This game doesn’t like it when you’re not connected to the internet. I play on my iPad, so cellular service isn’t an option when I’m without Wi-Fi. This game does not care that this is a common experience for many people. Every 10-30 seconds it tells me to retry connecting to the internet. It does not pause the timer or gameplay when doing so. Since this game is reliant on timed moves, this means I sometimes have to restart the level after I receive the pop up. It is absolutely infuriating. And speaking of, this game has two puzzles every level: an easy and a hard. If you want to restart while on the latter puzzle, you can either pay in-game currency to restart only the puzzle you’re on, or you can quit and have to do the first puzzle all over again. And some of these levels are ridiculously hard in the beginning. The devs did not take into account any sort of skill progression. The undo button is also something you have to use in-game currency on, instead of being free (and just lowering your score when used) like a normal game would. Overall this game design feels really malicious and the fact it keeps trying to connect to the internet when it doesn’t need to makes me wonder if the devs are using this game to collect and sell users’ data

What I love about this game is solving the puzzles. But the timer destroys the enjoyment of puzzle-solving. The game play itself is challenging enough to wind up needing to open the extra hole, use the tools to undo or destroy either a screw or plate. I don’t mind watching ads here and there to supplement collecting these things during game play. But when the timer is consistently set with an insufficient amount of time to solve the “hard puzzle” that is part of each level, it forces you to either spend cash or watch excessive ads to complete the puzzle. What I mean by excessive is that you spend around 45 seconds watching ads to get an additional 30 seconds of game play, and it is not unusual to do so 3 to 5 times in order to complete the puzzle, especially since it takes time to re-focus and re-orient yourself to the puzzle after returning from each lengthy ad. It becomes oppressive, and the only other option is to keep replaying the same level with the same puzzles and the same insufficient time. If this game simply got rid of the timer, it would be a 5-star app, and there would still be plenty of opportunities for them to make money without destroying the enjoyment of simply solving the great puzzles.