Cut the Rope: Experiments for iOS

Cut the Rope: Experiments is a fun follow-up to the arcade puzzler Cut the Rope, with a few new elements but the same core concept centered on inventive physics challenges, well-designed and replayable levels, and a cute little candy-loving monster named Om Nom.

The interface is the same: you swipe your finger to cut a rope (occasionally more than one, with multitouch) to drop an attached piece of candy into Om Nom's mouth, a task that becomes increasingly complex with the addition of floating bubbles, dangerous spikes, movable anchors, elastic ropes, and so on. As before, you're also trying to trying to maneuver the candy to pass across stars before reaching Om Nom--between one and three stars, but you don't need to get any to complete a level. In addition to the hazards in the original, Cut the Rope: Experiments adds in later levels a rope that's fired at the candy with a suction dart on the end (making for some tricky timing puzzles) and suction cups that are basically like movable anchors from the original, but which you can attach and remove from anywhere--and their open-endedness can make getting all three stars pretty challenging on some levels.

If you're a fan of the original, there's not a whole lot that's new here. But you can look at this release as a new pack of levels (75 in all), with some new twists thrown in, presumably with more levels to come--and given this game's high standards for design and presentation, that's not a bad deal at all. If you're not familiar with Cut the Rope, you should check out the original--although Cut the Rope: Experiments is a fine place to start, too, with plenty of guidance in its first 25 levels.