Games Spotlight: Spectrum Puzzles

Admit it, you’re a puzzle freak. You like nothing better than to take a jumble of small images–or odd-shaped cardboard pieces, if you’re really old school–and produce a complete picture suitable for framing. Spectrum Puzzles for Android understands.

Plenty of Puzzlement

This is not your grandmother’s puzzle app (if indeed, your grandmother even has a smartphone). Spectrum features a wide variety of cool features. The basic object is to unscramble images by sliding pieces around the screen. The app comes preloaded with nearly 50 vibrant, high-quality images to put together. These images cover the “spectrum” from still-life photos and nature shots to buildings and machines.

An interesting aspect of this app is that the puzzles are presented in order from easiest to most difficult. The first few will be child’s play, but you’ll probably be muttering to yourself as you gradually unlock and tackle the tougher ones. You can, however, choose four different sizes for each puzzle, ranging from 12 to 48 pieces. In addition to being able to pick the size of the puzzle, there are three difficulty settings: Easy, Medium, and Hard. These determine whether or not the pieces lock into place when you put them in the right spot, or if they show colored borders to make it even easier to place them. In this way, you can make it easier or harder on yourself.

Get the Picture?

The images included in the app are great, but it’s a lot more fun to use your own photos from your phone. Snap or select a picture of your friends or an interesting object, import it into the app, and boom–you’ve got a unique puzzle to complete. Therefore, the number of puzzles you can tackle in this app is unlimited.

Other helpful features in the app are Reminders (so you can refresh your memory of what the final image looks like), Pause, Restart (reset and start over), and the ability to save your puzzle and come back later. Of course, you’ll get so hooked on Spectrum that you’ll probably never use this feature. Must. Finish. Puzzle!

Show Your Stuff

In addition to progressing through the increasingly difficult puzzles, you can set personal marks for how long each puzzle takes you and how many moves you need to solve it. These stats are tracked for each size puzzle, so you can actually set eight different records for each one. That’s nearly 400 total records to set, so you’d better download Spectrum and get going, pronto. And expansion packs available from the Amazon Appstore contain even more challenges that’ll guarantee your puzzling pleasure for some time to come!

The base Spectrum Puzzles app is currently priced at just $1.49. Expansion packs currently available include the Spectrum Puzzles Expansion Pack (99 cents for 60 new puzzle images) and Spectrum Puzzles Spring Photos (99 cents for 58 new puzzle images). At these prices, you can get the entire set, over 150 puzzle images, for under four bucks!