Spire Blast is a puzzle game available on Apple Arcade. Reviewed on an iPhone 12.

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Spire Blast is one of the most satisfying feeling mobile games I have played. It’s like the game Collapse, meets Jenga, except unlike in Jenga, in Spire Blast, you want your tower to come tumbling down.

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The sound effects and the vibration is half of what makes the game feel so satisfying. The other half is the physics. You need to shoot colored balls at colored boxes that are building the spire. Take them out strategically to make the spire collapse. When you take out the right one to make it all come falling down, the way your phone vibrates just feels so good and doesn’t get old.

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Every level you need to collapse the entire spire but the levels will have different requirements you need to complete in conjunction with just bringing down the spire. These were pretty trivial for the most part. Get rid of a certain amount of a certain color, destroy certain special blocks, or feed the dragon. None of these really caused a challenge. These requirements mostly can be completed just by collapsing the spire. It was only a very small amount of time where I collapsed the entire spire and missed one of the requirements. More often than not, my failures would be running out of balls to shoot before collapsing the spire.

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At the time of writing this, there are 80 levels with more “coming soon” The first 50-60 levels really had no challenge at all to pass the level. There are 3 stars in each level which were hard to get, but just to pass the level was not hard at all. Then the difficulty spiked and I found myself struggling to collapse the spire with the number of shots I had in each level. This is an Apple Arcade game, so there are no microtransactions, but a difficulty spike like this made me wonder if this was originally a free to play game that had their microtransactions pulled out. To further support that theory, there is a currency you earn that is used to buy power ups that became very essential for me to complete all the levels. I found myself replaying missions to build up my currency to by myself powerups to progress.

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Besides that, the only real issue I had with the game was when they had extensions coming off the spire. There were small sections you also had to collapse but getting a good angle to shoot and see what’s there was almost impossible. Many times I would try to shoot a ball to these sections but would just be unable. It was frustrating, especially since the game feels so good to play outside of this.

Even with the difficulty spikes, this is still one of the best puzzle games on the platform. I look forward to more levels and I’m intrigued by what new ideas they can bring to the table. This is a game that will remain installed on my phone and I will jump in the first day new levels are available.

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Verdict

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Spire Blast is one of the best puzzle games available on Apple Arcade. The mechanic of collapsing a spire, looks and feels great. The physics are perfect. There is a noticeable difficulty spike and some design issues on some levels but it never stopped my enjoyment. I will be playing Spire Blast for years to come. I highly recommend this one.

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Final Score 8.5/10