The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
Summit Way
This week’s Game of the Week is one that caught my attention right off the bat. It’s called Summit Way ($1.99), and a cursory glance reveals a series of mountain peaks that are, um, peaking through the clouds. There’s a series of those sketchy wooden plank bridges (the kind you always see people forced to cross in movies and about halfway through a board falls down to a river way below) connecting the peaks together, and it’s just a visual that for whatever reason looked interesting to me. When I actually played and learned what Summit Way was actually about, I was almost instantly hooked on its really unique puzzle mechanics.
The point of Summit Way is to connect all the mountain peaks with those janky wooden bridges. You have a starter peak and you simply tap another peak to connect a bridge to it, and the goal is to connect all the peaks together with bridges and circle back around to the original peak without any bridges crossing. Sounds too easy, right? And it is, at least for the first several levels. However, soon a nifty mechanic is introduced that changes everything. There’s actually a “board count" where the longer bridges use more boards, and to achieve full stars on a level you’ll have to find out how to connect all the peaks using the least amount of boards as possible.
This instantly turned Summit Way into a near obsession for me. Finding the ultimate bridge route and shooting for a full 4 stars on a level is extremely fun and challenging. Compounding that challenge is another mechanic introduced where you’re given varying heights of peaks to connect. You can’t connect a bridge from a lowest-level peak with a highest-level peak without it breaking, so you’ll need to connect to a medium-height peak in between. This REALLY messes with your brain at times, and one of the most satisfying parts about Summit Way is THINKING you totally nailed the ultimate solution only to come up a star short. You then go back and suss out the actual perfect solution and it’s a great feeling to finally nail it.
It doesn’t stop there though. Forests where you can harvest more wood planks, castles that demand a ransom (harvested from a nearby mine) to let you build on them, cannons that blast your bridges to smithereens and more mechanics slowly weave their way into the game’s 72 levels. Summit Way may have an interesting look but it’s also totally unassuming, so I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to see gamers passing right over it. This would be a mistake. This is definitely one of the more unique and challenging puzzlers I’ve played in some time, and don’t we all just need a really solid puzzler from time to time? Summit Way is available on iOS with the link below or on Android with this link to the Google Play Store.
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