‘JengAR’ Review – Keeping Things Balanced
Following in the footsteps of recent augmented reality games such as card-battling The Eye of Judgement and the Pokemon-esque Invizimals, comes JengAR. Created by Marcin Pucalski as part of the Ludum Dare October Challenge, JengAR is currently available for purchase right now on the Google Play store, with plans to release it on the Apple App Store soon as well.
JengAR’s roots are based in a game that everyone can understand: Jenga. After printing and assembling a small rectangular tower out of paper, you simply place it in a well-lit space such as a table and point your camera towards it. The game then overlays a tower of wooden blocks over the paper, and you’re able to finally begin playing. Gameplay progresses exactly as you’d expect; you simply use the touch screen to grab a block, lift it up, and place it on top of the tower. The goal? Simply continue building the tower up as high as you can without letting it collapse.
The concept is certainly intriguing, but the game unfortunately does suffer from some of the flaws common to Augmented Reality titles. Most notably, the game requires the room to be brightly lit so the camera can detect the paper ‘marker’. As such at night time, even with the lights on the room, the game tends to have trouble picking up the marker. There is an option in the menu to enable the flash on your camera, but this unfortunately did not work at all on my phone. Another small issue is that it’s definitely not a game you can simply play anywhere; you need a flat, stable surface or the camera will be unable to pick up the marker properly.
Despite these rather understandable limitations, JengAR is an interesting title. It makes fantastic use of Augmented Reality software, and the concept is simple enough that anyone can understand. The mechanics work well, though as you might expect, your enjoyment of the game itself depends entirely on how much you enjoy playing Jenga.
If you’re interested in checking it out, you can either head over to the JengAR website at , or pick it up right now for $0.99 at the Google Play store.
