Dummy Defense

Dummy Defense, your job is to design a structure that will protect Melvin from accidents like a giant hammer and bombs. The structure or the building should cost (not exceeding quota costs) and robust in the face of accidents. Dummy Defense, Use the blueprints editor to design a structure that will protect your doll, Melvin, from some random danger. You have to work with the material provided. Most of the time you'll use wood, sometimes you'll use concrete, but you should always use the most important asset your brain. Create your design in seconds with the blueprints editor. If you make a mistake, simply tap the Undo button. Zoom in and out by pinching the screen and pan the view using a two finger drag. While testing, you can see how the tension is distributed in your design. Areas that are under immense pressure bright red, while other areas are colored green. It allows you to find and fix problem areas in your design.

Dummy Defense is due out (on the App store) on 20th March 2012 and is essentially more slick and improved version of the previous app – Simple Physics. We absolutely loved Simple Physics for its original idea, addictive nature and overall concept. We were however a little critical of a few things about the app – namely the very small number of levels, the price and the sometimes clunky interface.

We’re really pleased to report that, in our preview of the new app, Dummy Defense, each of the drawbacks we felt spoilt the previous version have been fixed! Yey! Dummy Defense will be a standard $0.99 app, have 25 levels and have an improved user interface. So what’s the game about? If you have played Simple Physics, then it’s essentially same concept. It’s about building structures to withstand different test conditions for each level. Dummy Defense is titled as such because the objective is to defend the crash-test dummy from being destroyed, either by big swinging hammers, meteor showers, crushing weights and so on. Each level presents you with a different environment and task, and it’s up to you to engineer the best solution. Your solution must come in under budget, otherwise you’ll not be able to move on to the next level – even if your design passes the test criteria.

Having had the game for half a day, we’re about half way through, and to be honest, having already plaid Simple Physics we found the first few levels were rather repetitive. Once you get  the hang of the kind of structures that work well, it almost feels like ‘one size fits all’. Luckily however, the game does start to get more difficult as you progress and new ideas are required to solve the engineering puzzles. We’re on level 17 at the moment and it’s got us stumped for at least 10 minutes, which in my book, is a good thing! The longer it can keep me trying the more addicted I get as I’m determined to crack it. If you get well and truly stuck on a level, there’s the option of buying the solution pack for $0.99 or £0.69 pence. It appears this will give you a “1 star solution for every level” in the game [25 levels]. The graphics are improved in this app from the previous one, and as we said before, the user interface has been cleaned up which just adds to the enjoyment of using the app.

Again, as with Simple Physics there are other features to the game such as being able to test your structure with finger pulls, being able to see and save blue prints and so on. We haven’t really used these features much, but I guess they’re are nice to have if you want to give them a try. Another feature to the game is a leaderboard. If you can design a solution that comes in well under budget, and is the cheapest build solution for that day (or of all time) you’ll get the chance to have your name in lights on the Dummy Defense leaderboard. This is a nice feature as it forces you to perhaps go back and re-visit some of your previous solutions if you think you could re-engineer them in a different, cheaper way whilst still passing the stress tests.