[Android] Slide into finish and collect precious diamonds in The Gem Hunt

It’s an age-old classic: the game where you slide across the ice, unable to stop until you hit a wall, trying to get to the ending spot by bouncing off of things. The Gem Hunt brings this all to Android, but instead of ice, it’s a very slippery dino.

What is it and what does it do

The Gem Hunt is by no means an original game. In it, you must slide your gem-hunting dinosaur across the playing field in an attempt to get to the crystals. However, the floor is extremely slippery, so the dino can’t stop moving once he starts. Instead, you need to calculate the path required to push off of everything in order to get to the gems in the fewest number of moves. Pros

Unique puzzles
Moving blocks for greater difficulty

Cons

Misplaced graphics on HP Touchpad/tablets
Does not scale for tablets
Only low-resolution imagery

As soon as you start up The Gem Hunt, you know that it’s not the game you were hoping it would be. On my HP Touchpad, the graphics were scaled up in such a way that made them almost blurry–and it has a lower resolution than many new smartphones. This lack of attention to detail–and the splash screen, the first thing your users see, is hardly a detail–is worrying from the get-go, and foreshadows later problems in the game. The Gem Hunt is definitely designed for phones, despite being a game that could be fun on tablets. The outer border of the playing field, a low resolution faux-Greco-Roman column, is glitched out and parts of it are duplicated to inside the playable square. The square itself is not much to look at either, as it’s only around 4″ across on my spacious tablet. The rest of the space is taken up by the interface, including the border, and my wallpaper. The gameplay itself is actually rather fun. Despite the very low-quality graphics surrounding it, The Gem Hunt lets you slide, move boxes, and even teleport, as shown in this video by the developer: As you can see in the video, the game performs much better on a small phone than on a tablet, but still lacks the necessary high-resolution, high-quality graphics.

Conclusion and download link

The Gem Hunt is definitely a game that you need to try to know about. If you’re one who cares about how your apps look, The Gem Hunt will definitely not appeal to your taste, but if you couldn’t care less, you may be perfectly content with The Gem Hunt. Personally, I like the gameplay, but the graphics throw me off a little too far.

Price: Free!

Version reviewed: v2.0