Full Review

I consider my time spent in retail as a sort of front-loaded penance for the rest of my life - anyone who has had to grind away time dealing with humanity on a piecemeal basis will appreciate how it either makes or breaks you, turning you in to a social wizard or a raving lunatic ready to set people on fire.

These days self-checkout machines are passing the frustration back to the customer as they attempt to quickly scan and safely pack away their groceries before being yelled at from the queue, and it's under these circumstances we find a game like Bag It! by Hidden Variable Studios being not only relevant, but possibly even educational.Players are presented with a bag and three items of a random assortment and their challenge is to not only pack, but prevent the goods within from being crushed under the weight of items above it. Furthermore you need to put everything in to the bag in a time limit and once you're done the resulting stack must survive for several seconds.This is no easy task at the best of times as the order of the items in each puzzle is tweaked to force players to constantly shift, rotate and jostle the items within. Things are made even harder as stars and badges are awarded for creating special combinations or fulfilling additional requirements, with the stars unlocking new puzzles and the badges unlocking new modes.To keep things fresh Bag It! adds new challenges such as being forced to crush as many items as possible within a time limit or entirely new game modes like trying to pack as many bags as possible as efficiently as possible.The near endless replayability makes the game well worth picking up all by itself, but when it's also combined with the cute, cartoonish presentation common to iOS puzzle games it gains a charm that's easy to keep coming back to.Bag It! is a surprisingly challenging and rewarding puzzler that can swing from brain tickling to amusing at the drop of a hat. Definitely worth picking up if you're after a puzzler that brings something new to the table.

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