Slice It! reminded me that I’m not great at geometry within about fifteen minutes of play. The idea of this $6 puzzler is easy enough — you’re presented with a 2D shape, be it something recognizable like a square or something unique and much more complex, and the goal is to slice it with your stylus using a pre-determined number of cuts and have exactly a certain number of equal-sized pieces remaining. Two hundred puzzles across two ‘episodes’ await, with a Quick mode that gives you thirty seconds to roll through shapes making a single cut to yield and additional equal-sized piece.
It’s the equal size part that makes Slice It! get difficult in a hurry. While the stylus is not the most precise tool for this, it works well enough and the circle pad can be used to fine tune slices for those times when accuracy is really important. For me, the hardest part is just envisioning what each slice is going to do and figuring out how to cut the shape with the required number of cuts to get the required number of same-sized pieces. There is an undo function that has no limit, and a hint option that will show you where to make the cuts, but hints are precious. The only way to get more is to play through the Quick mode, but that’s also hard.
Slice It! is setup nicely enough on the 2DS/3DS. You hold the system vertically, like you would for Hotel Dusk or Brain Age and other than using the circle pad at times, it’s entirely stylus-driven. Options are few, and include the ability to independently adjust the volume of the BGM and the SFX, the former of which gets grating in a hurry so I turned it down. The ‘womp womp’ sound of failure combined with the animation of your drawing getting scribbled out also gets old, fast.
Japanese language support (all text based, as is the English content) is included and you can unlock three more skins or themes and additional music, too. Ten different achievements, known as Missions, are yours to unlock and may give expert slicers reason to keep playing. There is also a star system to award your precision in each puzzle.
While offering a clean and accessible package, it didn’t take me long to determine that Slice It! wasn’t something I would play very often. Slice It! does have a clear number of short challenges, static rules throughout, and a deceptively simple premise that has kept me coming back here and there, but the frustration versus reward balance teeters in the wrong direction sooner than it did when I first started. Fortunately, you can skip puzzles and come back to them, but I wish hints were easier to come by and that there was some direct educational goals to this game rather than just a soulless challenge, if that makes sense. As it stands, I’ll keep this one installed in part thanks to its tiny footprint of just 468 blocks, but I’m not sure I’ll have the patience to complete all two hundred challenges.
To the summary…
