Beast, a remake of a 1984 DOS game, seeks to capture some of the retro game love flowing from the App Store. Games like Candy Wars have shown that it isn’t just the console ports that are grabbing all the attention. Unfortunately, Beast is a bit too buggy to live up to the hype. A few freeze-ups while playing the game keep it from living up to the promised potential.
The game play itself makes for a good challenge. You must crush a series of “beasts” by moving around blocks until they reign destruction on the enemies. Beast is not as easy as it sounds, because there are various rules governing which ones can be destroyed depending upon how the blocks are configured. It takes a while to get used to which blocks you must hit in which manner, but it should come around after playing Beast for a while.
But where Beast falls short is in some of the bugs that hang around during game play. When starting a round there is a significant lag as the game is frozen before the playing begins. I tried all types of ways to tap the screen in the beginning to try and get it going — holding down the screen, not touching it at all, tapping repeatedly; all with limited success. The game did eventually run as it was supposed to, but it was quite an irritation to have the beginning of each round be so unpredictable.
As for the rest of the game play Beast was fairly solid. The graphics struck the right balance between paying homage to the original game and having a clean, updated look befitting the iPhone.
With some bug fixes Beast will be a game worth having if you are looking for some challenging puzzle action or like the novelty of having older games from a bygone computing era on your iPhone/iPod Touch.