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iPad
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  • Entertainment
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  • Puzzle
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SiteSpot 360 app review: a futuristic 3-D puzzle game

Reviews

Introduction

For fans of puzzle games, their passion for this genre will sometimes border on obsessiveness and can lead to alienation from the rest of the family. If this describes you, and you want to keep a healthy relationship with your family, it might be best to try and involve them in your obsession by letting them complete the puzzles right along with you. There are tons of great options in the App Store for the puzzle game devotee and one of the newest ones is SiteSpot 360. This is a free app and it’s compatible with the iPad only.

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SiteSpot 360 Photo Sphere jigsaw

Free

How the Puzzle Began

This app was created by indie developer Christian de Marta in February, 2016, so it’s still a relatively new app. He created this app in partnership with the Italian mobile app design company Codestep based in Milan. This is a company that has a reputation for helping out indie developers like Marta.

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As an indie developer, you often face a lot of challenges trying to get an app in the App Store and that’s why it makes sense for someone like this to partner up with a service like Codestep App Factory. With their experience in backing indie developers, Marta was able to create an app that looks both professional and appealing. There are a ton of apps in the App Store created by indie developers, but unfortunately many of them look quite amateurish.

Marta got the idea for creating this 3-D puzzle game while working on virtual tours for various different agencies he was associated with. He quickly recognized that people really do love being immersed in 3-D environments and with his background in mobile software development and love of puzzles he could create something that would appeal to a lot of people. It didn’t hurt that he’s a fan of architecture and photography as well.

It was this overall combination of interests that inspired him to create a puzzle game that used real-time photos and sound in a 3-D rendered environment. I’ve always been a strong believer that when you’re passionate about something there’s a much better chance that you’ll produce your best work.

Solving Puzzles in 3-D

As there is no shortage of puzzle games in the App Store, it’s difficult for a developer to stand out when releasing this type of product, but Marta has done a pretty credible job producing something that’s a little different from the average puzzle app in the App Store. It’s not what I would call groundbreaking by any means, but it does have the potential to become fairly popular – that is at least with a few improvements.

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The reason I say it needs a few improvements before it will become a popular download is because it has some glitches in it. For one thing, when you open the app there’s no real explanation of what you’re supposed to do – you’re simply presented with a group of thumbnail pictures and left to figure things out for yourself. As it turns out, it’s not extremely difficult to figure out, but it’s very strange that the developer didn’t feel any need to make life easier for the end user.

Another more serious problem that I ran into with this app, is that it has a tendency to crash. Almost every single time I started a new puzzle, it would crash after only a minute or two. This made it extremely difficult and annoying to make any kind of progress. If you’re the type of person that doesn’t have a lot of patience you’ll quickly lose interest in this game. This app will require 55.1 MB of available space on your iOS device.

SiteSpot 360 Photo Sphere jigsaw

Free

Putting the Puzzle Together

It turns out this isn’t really a difficult app to use, but it is a little frustrating that there’s no direction at all. Once the app loads up (and this does take a while) you can simply scroll through the thumbnail gallery and choose a picture that you find appealing and as an odd quirk you then have to purchase the picture using coins provided within the app – I’m not sure what the purpose of this is as I never seemed to have a problem buying a picture puzzle I wanted to work on. It’s possible that your coins eventually run out, but I never spent enough time on this app to figure that out.

As I’ve already mentioned, this app crashes repeatedly – at least it did for me. That made it really hard to enjoy it and difficult to give it much of a chance. The concept is a great one don’t get me wrong, but it’s not much fun if you can never complete a puzzle.

Each puzzle can be worked on in either a beginner mode or advanced mode. If you choose the advanced mode, the puzzle pieces are much smaller and a little bit more challenging because of this. Each puzzle starts with a blank board and one puzzle piece on the board to get you going. The rest of the puzzle pieces are located on a bar at the bottom that you can scroll through until you find the puzzle piece you’re looking for. Once you’ve found that piece you’re looking for, you can drag it onto the board and attach it to the puzzle where you think it fits.

Apparently, once you’ve completed the puzzle, you’ll be able to move around it in 3-D and listen to sounds associated with that picture. It seems like a great idea to me, but I never actually got the chance to see if this was true as I couldn’t get past the consistent crashing of the app. 

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Includes a large the thumbnail gallery of puzzles
  • You can choose beginner or advanced mode for completing puzzles
  • Completed puzzles can be viewed in 3-D by rotating through the picture
  • Also, completed puzzles include sounds associated with the picture

Cons

  • No instructions
  • Continuously crashed on me before I could complete a puzzle

The Puzzle Solver's Preference

This game has a lot of potential. I like the concepts behind it. Unfortunately, I had issues with the app crashing. However, I'm sure that if this isn't a problem for you, then you will seriously enjoy this app. It all comes down to the puzzle player's preference, and I think this app makes for a great option in this genre of games. 

SiteSpot 360 Photo Sphere jigsaw

Free
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Allan Calder

Allan is a freelance writer who loves scouring the App Store for exciting, intriguing and unique apps.