The Heist review

The Heist is a brand new iPhone game from the Heist group where you are trying to break into a bank safe by solving a series of mind bending puzzles. Once you start the app you actually get a simulated phone call on your iPhone from a lady called Sophia. The call looks just like the iPhone’s own incoming phone call screen. Tap the Answer button and listen to Sophia explain the task at hand in a deep Russian accent. The first time I saw this, I was honestly kind of confused and blown away at the same time. Not because it’s very difficult to simulate this, but just how brilliant and simple of an idea it is, not to mention quite effective at getting your attention. Unlock enough puzzles in a limited period of time and you’ll unlock the safe, plus the developer throws in a real world prize for your dedication.

There are a total of 4 locks on the vault which have to be turned form red to green. After you solve enough puzzles in each category an reach the threshold shown by the blue bar on the bottom new puzzles are unlocked. After clearing each stage a new phone call comes in from Sophia explaining what you need to do next. Each puzzle type has 15 rounds for total of 60 puzzles, so you’ll be quite busy for some time.

The graphics in all the puzzles and the game itself are above average and the special effects when you solve puzzles are really well done. The soundtrack and effects are high quality and pretty intense. While there is not much originality with the puzzles themselves, they are unique in their design and implementation.

To break into the vault you have to solve types of puzzles:

Parking Lot with wood: One of the puzzles is a basic parking lot solving game with wood pieces instead of cars. Move the blocks of wood around until you find a way to move the glass reactor to the exit point on the right.

Sudoku with rocks: The second puzzle is basically variations on the Sudoku theme with 6 sectioned off areas and a variety of colored stones with various symbols. Place all the rocks on the board without an matching symbols on the same row. When you make a mistake the offending pieces on the board are lit up to white for your reference. These puzzles start out easy and get really intense as you go further. The rocks get really small in the later stages and they are really tough to pickup with your fingertips. This is probably the main gameplay issue in The Heist.

Sokoban with a little robot: Push little boxes of green light using a robot around a maze and land them on destination blocks to finish these puzzles. I found after some playing that each can just tap the destination block where you want the robot to walk to, instead of tapping one block at a time. I found this one to be the most enjoyable of all 4 puzzles.

Tiles game with wires: This is your basic tile game and you need to line up allt he colors to line up on the wires. The puzzles start out easy using a 3×3 grid, and get more difficult once you move into the 4×4 boards.

After you unlock the safe and get your heist on, you will receive a special bonus gift from MacHeist for your efforts. The gift is in the form of a Steam code for a game called Eets. The developer is also running a different twitter contest where they are giving away iPads to a few people once a day.

Overall, The Heist is a really well designed and fun puzzle game for the iPhone. If you’re a fan of solving challenging puzzles, you’ll get a kick out of this game and its creative bank robbery premise gives it extra fuel for success.

Here is a video demo of the The Heist app on the iPhone

AppSafari Rating: 4.5/5

AppSafari review of The Heist was written by Joe Seifi on May 27th, 2011 and categorized under App Store, Featured, Games, Puzzler. Page viewed 7345 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.