Game Review: Slice It! (Nintendo 3DS)

Here’s an honest truth about myself: I am terrible at puzzle games. I’m playing Hitman GO at the moment, and while I enjoy the game, I have to admit that I’m not terribly good at it.

I’ve known this for a while, and I’ve learnt to live with it.

Enter our friends at Aksys, and Slice It! for 3DS. A puzzle game. And not a Sudoku-style puzzle (I do rather well at Sudoku), but a puzzle game based on (you guessed it), slicing.

The premise of the game is quite simple: You’ll be given a “piece of paper”, that you have to slice a certain way, in a certain number of slices, to get a certain amount of pieces. Sounds easy enough, right?

Wrong.

The thing is, the difficulty ramps up right away (at least for me), and the puzzles become devilishly tricky. I’m a huge fan of Pushmo & Co., so I adore me some puzzle action on the 3DS. I think this type of game completely personifies what portable gaming became huge for (remember that old game called “Tetris”?). Even so, I found the puzzles quite hard.

slice it 2

Not to be out-done by a game, though, I persevered. In vain, mostly, but I did.

A cool thing about the game is that it plays on the 3DS like a book, so it’s side-by-side screens, instead of one on top of the other. We’ve seen this mechanic before, but I’m stumped as to why we don’t see it more often. It’s a bit heavy on a 3DS XL, sure, but it’s so much more intuitive for some reason. My guess is, it’s because our eyes are side by side, and not on top of one another. But I’m not a doctor, so take that with a grain of salt.

There isn’t much to the game beyond slicin’-and-dicin’, and that’s perfectly fine. This “destructive and reverse virtual origami emulator” (Aksys marketing department: I’m available for copyrighting) game is all it needs to be. Including affordable: $5.99 of your hard-earned dollars will net you 140 levels (yes, one hundred and forty).

slice it 3
Ah, how this screen reminds me of my dating life.

The game is obviously tailor-made to be played with the stylus, but you can use the circle pad to adjust the lines more precisely. I have to admit this is one issue I had with the game: there were a few times where I knew what I needed to do, but the “hit detection” didn’t register my line where it needed to be.

Aside from that, it was all jolly good (minus the frustration of being terrible at it).

If you’re a puzzle fan with a 3DS and 6 bucks to spare on what will surely result in no less than 6 or 7 hours of puzzlement, you should definitely give Slice It! a go.

There’s no shortage of puzzle games on the 3DS, but few have this combination of good level design and affordability.

It’s also great for children! (although I have to say, they gotta be some pretty smart children).

About Marcos Codas 279 Articles
Lover of portable gaming and horror cinema. Indie filmmaker and game developer. Multimedia producer. Born in Paraguay, raised in Canada. Huge fan of "The Blair Witch Project", and "Sonic 3D Blast". Deputy head at Vita Player and its parent organization, Infinite Frontiers. Like what I do? Donate a coffee: https://www.paypal.me/marcoscodas

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