Union Reviews

A short puzzle game for a single day

Union takes the classic 'rotate the pipes' (or electrical circuit) game and adds a bunch of extra features. Swappable and changeable pieces are new, as is the WiFi broadcast. The game is beautiful in its minimalism, and the soundtrack is both relaxing and upbeat modern synth. I'd be interested in playing it again on my tablet, as the simplicity of play fits that medium as well as home computer.

Fantastic logic game and for a great price! Love the simplicity of it as well.

fun little puzzle game, very much worth its price for 50 levels

This is an excellent choice for this price range. While the game starts simple, some later levels are quite challenging.

Wow some of those levels were quite a challenge to solve! It's a great puzzler -- simple connect-the-dots kind of premise but introduces mechanics as you progress. Helps keep the levels fresh as you progress through 50 of them. The calming music is a nice touch as well!

Union is a puzzle game from the "difficulty by complexity" school of game design. I didn't find it particularly appealing. Firstly, regarding the level design: The difficulty is all over the place; there's no difficulty curve to speak of. And difficult levels are difficult not due to interesting puzzle design, but only due to high complexity and level size. E.g. level 49, the final level, consists of 96 tiles. Secondly, the UI is far too minimalist for the mechanics. There are tiles you can move around, but for silly minimalist reasons, they're placed on the grid in arbitrary wrong positions, rather than to the side of the levels. So you can't easily tell if a movable tile is where it is because you've intentionally placed it there, or because you've yet to move it to a better spot. This adds an entirely unnecessary memorisation component to the challenge. Also, you can't make a monochromatic game and then add ultra-subtle outlines for three entirely different kinds of tiles: rotatable vs. swappable vs. toggle-able. The game needed either different colors for different tiles, or fewer tile types. And finally, later levels absolutely required an ability to lock in or mark tiles once they're in the correct position. I straight-up gave up on solving level 49 by hand when I realized I was wasting my time by trying to identify locked-in pieces on a screenshot, just because the game lacked a lock-in / marking feature. What a dumb design omission. Final verdict: Not recommended.