Block Buster Billy

Block Buster Billy, developed by Bigosaur, is a challenging puzzle game that tasks players with solving a variety of math-based conundrums. As the titular character Billy, your objective is to clear a path to the treasure chest by manipulating blocks containing numbers and mathematical operators. The game features a diverse range of levels, each requiring strategic thinking and problem-solving skills to overcome. At its core, Block Buster Billy's gameplay involves sliding blocks horizontally or vertically to create equations that equal the target number. Equations can involve basic arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Once an equation is formed, the blocks involved merge into a larger block, which can be moved out of the way to create a path to the treasure chest. The game's difficulty curve is well-balanced, introducing new elements and complexities at a comfortable pace. As you progress through the levels, you'll encounter various obstacles and mechanics that add depth to the gameplay, such as teleportation tiles, ice blocks, and even more advanced math concepts. One of Block Buster Billy's features is its robust level editor. This po…

Good ideas dragged down by inelegant design. I don't like how many unuseful pieces are laying around in every level. I understand good puzzle design as having only elements with a hidden purpose that surprises us for its ingenuity. I don't get any of that here. You just need to exhaust possible calculations in your mind and disregard the pieces that are just in the way. It is not a bad game, but there are many others that I would recommend over this one. Only play it if you are so into puzzles that you would play anything and everything.

Brilliant puzzle game! Combining and breaking apart blocks creates a lot of unique sokoban challenges, and I thought it was a satisfying way to refresh my math skills. You're able to click to instantly go to any accessible tile, which is a big time-saver, but I think it needs to be indicated better in-game. I was only aware of it because I saw an update post on the game's page. The game could also benefit from a way to track your progress. It has 101 puzzles to complete and I managed to do them all, but it would be nice to have a star next to the save file when you've done them all, or maybe make (xx/101) show up after you've completed the "last" puzzle. [Edit: When I first played it, the game had art that was likely done with AI, and I mentioned that in the original version of this review. The dev commissioned the art and was unaware that it was AI-generated. Once I brought it up, the developer personally redid the cutscene graphics. The new ones are pretty simple and a bit goofy, but I find them endearing. I wholeheartedly recommend supporting the dev and this game!]

It's a good puzzle idea and I see the vision, but in my opinion the issue is that the puzzles quickly become very tedious to solve. Even if you know the solution, be prepared to spend a lot of time arranging and pushing blocks around - because this is still a Sokoban game - only to test your solution. The limited space often makes this hard, and the mix of having to solve math equations while also dealing with the Sokoban concepts make for an unfun and tedious experience. It's like playing two games at once. The game also gets very hard very quickly, which is fine in theory, but it makes the tedious block pushing even more annoying when you spend minutes arranging things only to figure out something doesn't work, so you reset the level and start all over again. Not every concept is well explained either - sure, it's just math for the most part, but I had several solutions laid out in my head for some levels that just didn't work in practice and I'm still not sure why. The repetitive music and (too) simple art don't really help matters either. With a bit more gentle difficulty scaling and some more introductory concepts on what can or can't work in the math equations, and maybe so…

Fun and challenging.

It's Sokoban, but with math. Like many Sokoban games, you can only push one block at a time. But a valid equation merges into a single block, so you can push all of that in one go. With mechanics like intersecting equations (they all form a single block of a weird shape), breaking equations if they are made illegal, variables to capture number values, and so on, there's a ton to think about here. It [i]is[/i] ultimately still a Sokoban-like, which means sometimes the problem is in the execution. Given that equations naturally need a lot of blocks, it's definitely a common occurrence that you need to move multiple blocks to the correct position, and doing so is not particularly interesting. That said, I think the rest of the mechanics holds up enough that I can stomach having to handle the block pushing moments. A lot of the smart ideas come from making precise equations with the blocks you have, and you usually have ample space to manipulate everything into place once you have the equations. The graphics are simple, but that's a plus, it doesn't require a high-end computer to run. It's pleasant to simply boot it up and play. Is it worth it? If you [i]really[/i] hate block pushin…