Trism is a multi-angle slide and match puzzle game from Demiforce LLC. It costs $4.99 and features 3 game modes, an excellent tutorial, 22 achievements, online scoring and, get this, color blind support. The main game mode, called Infinism, fills the game board with triangular tiles each belonging to one of five color types. The object of Trism is to slide the the tiles in one of six directions in order to match a group of three or more tiles from the same color. When a match is made the tiles involved in the match are removed. This creates open spaces which are filled by gravity. Gravity slides tiles down to fill the holes bringing in new tiles from along the sides. While gravity always pulls tiles down, rotating your iPhone makes “down” a relative term. Players, can tilt their phone in any direction to change how the tiles slide. When tiles slide they will often make other matches, which in turn causes them to disappear which creates more sliding and, hopefully, more matches. This process is called “chaining” and it’s how the big points in Trism are scored. There are a ton of other features in Trism, such as rainbow tiles, bomb tiles, black tiles and locked tiles. The tutorials does a excellent job of explaining how most of these features work.

Even if Infinism was the only game mode in Trism, Demiforce would still have a great game on their hands. Lucky for iPhone gamers, Trism comes with two other modes. Terminism, which is basically a timed version of the main game mode and, my favorite, Syllogism. Syllogism, is a logic puzzle that challenges players to clear pre-defined boards in a certain number of moves.

Trism is one of the better puzzle games for the iPhone. It’s quick to load, easy to play, hard to master, has lots of replay value and packs in a ton of well thought out features and depth. As a color blind gamer my Star Wars trucker hat is definitely off to Demiforce. The inclusion of a color blind mode was unexpected and seriously awesome.

There was very little I didn’t like about Trism. The multi-angle approach of the game takes a little getting used to. The ability to slide new tiles in from multiple directions did not immediately seem beneficial and it’s something I pretty much ignored for a few days. As I progressed, I found the multi angle feature to be more and more important. Because you can slide tiles in six different directions it’s easy to slide tiles on the wrong axis. This occasionally slowed down game play or break my flow (that’s right, I got flow). On a nit-picky level, I wasn’t a big fan of the game icons or fonts. The “hazard” symbol doesn’t feel like the right choice for the Trism logo to me.

Trism makes fantastic use of the iPhone while delivering a unique fun filled puzzle gaming experience. If you like slide and match puzzle games you won’t be disappointed with Trism.

By: Aaron Robbins