Are you smarter than an eleven-year-old? No, this is not a sequel to the Noel Edmonds-hosted quiz show where contestants battled it out with a team of geniuses-in-training. It’s a genuine question. Could you beat one at chess? More to the point, could you beat an app designed by one? I’m 34 and I don’t think I could design an app if my life depended on it. I wouldn’t even know where to start! This is certainly not the case with eleven-year-old Brayden from Indiana. Brayden’s a bit of a whiz-kid. He’s designed an entire app, graphics, logic and all, from scratch. It’s an addictive little gamer called Dot Worlds and now it’s available to everyone via iOS. That’s some feat Brayden. But is it any good?
In a word, yes. It’s a very simple little set up, but with some creative, original tweaks that put it a notch above its competitors. Most importantly, its addictive as all holy hell. Brayden’s smart you see, he’s realised that these type of games live or die on their re-playability. Fortunately, he’s struck just the right balance of challenge and fast paced action with his app. The levels are quick to complete, if you’ve got the finesse to pull it off. Most will take you two or three goes. Some will take ten. Either way, you’ll have a tough time putting this one down.
So what’s it all about? Basically, it’s about uniting a red dot with a green one. The red one moves, you control it by tilting your phone with varying degrees of aggressiveness, and eventually you roll it on top of the green to complete the level. Done, on to the next one. They get harder though. Various threats exist to block your path of course; removable walls, pointy diamond things and ominous black triangles all conspire to halt your progress. Some levels are even timed, adding a whole new dimension of pressure. There’s also a cool feature which allows you to control two balls at once; I say cool, it’s actually incredibly challenging.
In fact, the whole game is challenging, but in a hugely enjoyable way. You’ll feel a genuine sense of achievement with each passing level, and thankfully, the game saves automatically every ten levels, so you don’t have to worry about starting from the very beginning. If you’re looking for a cool, addictive little mini-game that uses its simplicity in the best way possible, then pick up Dot Worlds. And don’t be turned off by the fact it was designed by a kid; you’ll have to try very hard indeed to beat this 11-year-old.
Roll over to the App Store to get tilting with Dot Worlds today!
