iMusic Puzzle
by Lew Reed on Friday 19th Mar 2010

Line up the music boxes to make a sequence!

For every music game released – that is, one which requires you to interact directly with the music – fans and onlookers alike will often reach the same conclusion as to how it can be improved. “I want to use my own music”, they chant, and for good reason. iMusic Puzzle employs exactly this, and to no doubt significant effect over using pre-determined songs.

The advantages inherent in using a personal music library are numerous, and mostly obvious; It’s personal, so you don’t have to play “In Bloom” if you don’t want to; the play time is extended infinitely, depending on the size of your music collection; precious iPhone space is not wasted with songs you might not even like. It’s fortunate that the iMusic Puzzle has this significant advantage when looking at how incredibly limited the experience is, even for a puzzle game. There are three puzzle types, and two of them are bonus rounds so really they are peripheral. Picking Arcade mode for a random selection, or Quick Play to make a playlist, you’ll be given a section of song split up into three or more sequential snippets of sound for you to line up in the order in which they play in the song. Other puzzle types are essentially matching two boxes that play clips from the same song; these are far less interesting.

The game relies entirely on your music collection for a worthwhile experience, and certain genres of music simply will not be as fun to play along to. Something like Dream Theater, for example, is so chaotic that it might be hard to make sense of the clips and put them in order, but for the same reason it might prove easy if you know how the songs go. The Blues, being traditionally formulaic might be too easy because of the predictable chord progression, whereas some forms of electronic music may be difficult because of how similar it can sound from one bar to the next.

It does, then, depend almost entirely on your music collection as to how much you will get out of this game. If you listen to a wide variety of music that’s perhaps more sporadic and layered then iMusic Puzzle will at least be interesting and challenging. To conclude that a game is almost entirely subjective would be a bit of a waste of time, but this is pretty close to the truth. What you should take away is that what you get out of the game will depend on how much you enjoy listening to music, and not much else.