Spire Blast Apple Arcade - Tip, Walkthrough, Glitch

Fun puzzle game

Sat Jan 23 2021 Slarrg

I enjoyed the game and played it straight through. The gameplay is smooth and the puzzles are interesting. I hope to see the game expanded with new levels and would welcome a randomized mode that just builds on-the-fly towers outside of the leveling system as this would be a great game to just zen out and play throughout the day as a diversion. There are a couple of issues. Like most AA games, there is nothing explaining how the game works, what objectives need to be met, nor how scores are calculated. Even after playing all the way through, there are things I’m not really sure about: why do shots sometimes seem to do nothing? Should I be trying to create cascading tower destruction or shoot while it’s crumbling to get higher scores? Why do adjacent blocks of the same color clear sometimes and not others? Why do the bombs clear for a hit next to them sometimes and not other times? I have no clue whether I should clear the balconies or focus on the main tower, neither seems to work particularly well with the available ammo. And, so on. Also, I’m not a fan of iPad games with a portrait orientation in general and prefer to play games in landscape. However, if it must be portrait, though, it should support upside-down so it can be played handheld while plugged in without having the cable stabbing you in the chest while you play.

Loads of fun. One bug that can ruin your score.

Sun Dec 25 2022 BuckysLeftArm

This game really is a ton of fun. It’s basically Jenga but you are aiming for the complete opposite. But there is one problem that is constantly killing my score. Once you get towards the bottom of the tower and you tap the block you want to shoot at, instead, most of the time, it will switch the block color between the two options you have on each turn. After a while of trying to tap as precisely as possible and it just switching every time I, more often than not, shoot the wrong color and use a shot that I did not intend. Given that a big part of the end level score is based on how FEW shots you use, this can be a bit of a frustrating issue. Perhaps tweaking the UI so the area tapped to trigger the shoot touch event is in the middle while the switch color touch event area is off to the side. The graphic could be a canister similar to those games where you are trying to break objects of the same color to get them to fall. Sort of like a loaded pinball machine. Might require a bit more model rendering and such but it would definitely fix the problem.

A fun game worth a look

Tue May 31 2022 Ryhanon

This is a fun game and worth a look. I previously was a bit annoyed because of a game breaking bug I encountered but the developers fixed the issue pretty quickly and I’ve been having a blast since. The only real criticism I have is that the difficulty curve of the game seems out of whack. I’ll play a dozen levels back to back with barely a challenge and then get stuck on one level for quite a while, struggling to hit all objectives, let alone 3 stars - only to go back to super easy levels right afterward. Beyond that, I’d like to see something more akin to a “puzzle” mode - where you have to really think about how to take down the tower in a strategic way as opposed to the almost mindless levels that permeate the game right now. As satisfying as it is to take down each tower it gets a bit boring after a while because none of the levels really offer a puzzle-like challenge.

Spire Blast’s unlucky number... 🤭

Mon Feb 01 2021 janek.laski

To be honest I had to think, twice about getting this game, I really underestimated it. I finally installed it and started playing. At first it was just what I thought it was, knocking down tower, but as I played on I discovered goals and power ups. And the levels got more challenging, I was stuck on level 22 for 49 minutes! 😆 It’s so interesting how knocking down a tower can be so hard! The graphics and animations are amazing, and I he never ran in to a glitch yet! Ever single level is a bit more challenging, but not in a bad way. It is also very creative, it kinda reminds of candy crush, but I would play spire blast instead anytime! This game is for anyone who likes squishing slime, or popping bubble rap because this game is extremely SATISFYING. This game is my new favorite, with “what the golf” and “lego brawls”. Week later: I reach level 36 an as soon as click play, the game crashes, I tried like millions of times, nothing helps... (I am playing on a iPad 14, I dunno the details.) This really disappoints me because this game is so fun, and I am going to have too wait until you devs fix it. Sadly I also re-gave this game three starts, because of this glitch, from five stars, to three...

Should be fun but isn’t.

Thu Feb 04 2021 Protodad

I don’t know what’s up with this game. The first few levels make sense where you can target just the right blocks to get a chain reaction of toppling. After level 4 or so you get blocks just stacked vertically on each other so shooting out the bottom stack does...nothing. The blocks just drop straight down. You seem to get a smaller bonus from toppling large sets of blocks than just shooting 1 large block of color which takes away any strategy. To top it off, the game just slams you into a wall before level 10. No idea why it’s set up that you can get 3 stars and still fail a level. Apparently I just have to spam power ups. Seriously though, the worst design seems to be that the unbreakable blocks below (which impede your progress) are based on the location of the highest block above it, not the total number of blocks left. You can completely remove 75% or more of the available blocks and still the unbreakable ones down move down because one “spire” of 10 blocks is still tall.

Had been fun, had been looking forward to the new levels...

Sat Mar 27 2021 random9q

Every tower is more wobbly than it had been, especially the higher level towers. Some can’t be completed without power ups. Some can’t even be completed *with* power ups. What had been a fairly chill puzzle game now feels like an impossible race to beat the goals before everything falls over. (Don’t take a puzzle game like this and turn it into a twitch game? Please?) Honestly, I feel like the goals in the game are a little strange. Making them _optional_ might make sense, and could open up an alternate play mechanic where the goal IS to see how quickly (time) or efficiently (fewest thrown balls) one can get to the bottom, the goals just being bonuses or there for replayability. But if I ground out forty and more of each power up waiting for the update to come out, and I’m actually burning through those “extras” several times faster than I can generate them and *still* stuck not being able to make those goals, something’s out of balance.

Getting better

Sun Feb 07 2021 MrsDMickey

This app is better than it was - much better. The level 60 bug is fixed, the physics seem to be much more realistic. With that said, there's a few things that could use some work: The blocks sometimes register direct hits as misses, and you can tell the game is still linking blocks that were originally connected when the tower was set up, but became disconnected after part of the tower was removed. I'll hit a block and it will remove blocks that it used to be connected to, even though they are no longer touching. The "side towers" aren't consistent in how you can get them to disappear. Most of the time removing the main tower below them is enough, but sometimes I've had to clear every block on them to get them to go away so I can get access to more of the main tower. The ranking should be based on cumulative score, not level completed. Once you hit level 80, you're done, and regardless of whether you three-starred every level or not your ranking won't change. Whoever got to 80 first is permanently in 1st place, and so on. Basing it on total score is better. Even when more levels are released, it'll just be a race to get to the top, instead of basing it on who did the best overall. Glad to see that the devs are improving this app - it could be one of the most fun apps on arcade if they fix all the little issues with it.

Battery drainer and now it won't launch

Mon Mar 07 2022 snarkDADmin

Update: I decided to try it again and even in energy saver and low graphics. Even worse, they've added some virtual pet garbage that gets in the way and can't be turned off. This feels like a free to play app that I half expect to start pestering me for microtransactions instead of an Apple arcade game. Removing it again, and this time, I won't be reinstalling it. Original review: Drains battery faster than any other game I've ever played on iOS and it makes the device get crazy hot. I beat a level earlier and it crashed right as it ended the completion animation, then all my apps would crash within a couple seconds of opening until I restarted the phone. Thankfully only this app will no longer open. It's a shame, because the game is fun. However, now I cannot play it, and frankly I'm tired of plowing through so much battery in the course of 30 or so minutes of play time during the few downtimes I get during the day. Plenty of other great casual games I can play that don't turn my device into a glorified hand warmer.

I want to review Apple Arcade as a whole.

Sat Feb 06 2021 Dr. Shvatz

As for the stars, those are for this game. It plays like it was supposed to be a pay-to-play game but I’m assuming that because the library for Apple Arcade is so slim that it was thrown in as filler. On that note, Apple Arcade needs more and better games that are worth the monthly fee. Not reprogrammed pay-to-play bomb shells. And there happens to be quite a few of them. One pac man game in the whole library and it’s only fun if you know someone who also has Apple Arcade, One sonic game and it’s sonic racing (enough said), and a version of Frogger that is almost as unplayable as the game I’m trying to review. On that note, Spire Blast is terrible. It’s a block matching game with poor physics that’s impossible to progress through unless you replay the first four levels over and over again to get power ups that do very little but move you three to four more levels ahead. It has an endless music loop that never changes and it feels less than gratifying when you beat a level. It’s a sad time waster that will leave you with no sense on accomplishment. Why was this game headlined? For a while it sat on top of the Apple Arcade page like it was a must have. This should have been buried under all the Apple Arcade games. Lastly, please give us a bigger library of good games, Apple Arcade. We pay you monthly for entertainment. Not “First game made by a developer in college” type games.

Unintuitive, obtuse puzzler

Thu Jan 28 2021 Sonicator844

I have a degree in physics and I still can’t figure out why things fall over or not in this game. The graphics and animation are great, but the “physics” is a complete mystery to me after 29 levels. I deleted it after about a dozen levels, but saw a bunch of good reviews and played the rest to see if it could grow on me. It has utterly failed to do so. I did figure out that coins are acquired by clearing large sets of a single color and that having extra blocks fall off is only good for points, but still am not sure what determines how many points each of those extra blocks are worth, but think it may have to do with the number of blocks you eliminated. I also have no idea what triggers the end of the level. There are so many things that I have not figured out that the mediocre gameplay and trivial use of dragons (which featured prominently in the advertising that interested me in the first place) have pushed me to delete it again and permanently.