Where's My Water?

Where's My Water?
Where's My Water? Cover
Platforms Android, iOS
Genre Watery puzzler
Buy for Android
Buy for iOS

I played quite a few mobile games in 2011, and I don't expect that to change much in 2012. Where's My Water? was available as a Free App of the Day on the Amazon Android store a few weeks ago, and I picked it without much thought and tucked it in the mobile queue. Free games are great, especially on a pick-up-and-play platform like a phone. It's pretty amazing how the ideas behind a First Hour Review can be boiled down from 60 minutes to 30 seconds.

Where's My Water? passed my immediate test of being playable and having an interesting concept; a few days later with every rubber ducky collected and all the challenge levels defeated, I'm ready to declare it a triumphant mobile game along the lines of Angry Birds and Cut the Rope, here are my thoughts.

As a physics-based puzzler, Where's My Water? is hardly unique in the mobile space. But water physics? I haven't seen that much. The goal is to move some water underground from point A to point B. Why? So that a new Disney crocodile mascot can take a shower. The idea is simple, cute, and just be glad you're not delivering water so Donald Duck can take a bath.

The genius behind the concept is how well the fluid physics are executed, and the various ways the developers took advantage of their well-tuned gameplay engine. Water follows the force of gravity, so carving paths through the soft dirt lets you direct it downward, but pipes, balloons, and pressure allows you to manipulate water even further. Toss in poisonous water, sewer sludge, and water clogging mold, and you have the indgredients to a mobile classic.

Wheres my Water MazeWhere's My Water is broken up into over 100 confined stages, similar to Cut the Rope but with quite a bit more complexity. The goal is always the same, move some water into a pipe that feeds into Swampy the crocodile's shower. Sometimes you're only supplied with a limited about of liquid and have to be very careful about containing it during transportation, but other times a pipe might be on full blast giving you more wiggle room to experiment. Usually you'll need to navigate water downwards, but you'll also face plenty of scenarios where you need to move water up or laterally.

Like any great puzzler, what makes Wheres My Water? so fun is how smart the game makes you feel after successfully completing a level. You just combined poison and sludge to blow a hole in the wall, and then propelled clear water through a pipe, blasting it through the hole to victory. Or you split up a limited supply of water to hit three different switches, and then funneled it back together through a gate you just opened. Each stage will bring a smile to your face.

And like Cut the Rope, the real difficulty in Where's My Water comes in collecting three rubber ducks per stage along with delivering the water. A duck is nabbed when you flow five (sometimes precious) droplets of water into it, but they're often in out of the way places forcing you to detour your water supply into sometimes dangerous territory. There are also a few hidden collectibles scattered around that unlock bonus stages.

After loving my time with Where's My Water?, I decided to return to Cut the Rope and see which one I enjoyed more. To my pleasant surprise, there were 75 new levels available to me, and after playing through about half of them, I can honestly say that Where's My Water? is a much better game, and I gave Cut the Rope a 9/10... I think that means I'm done scoring mobile games, for now. Buy Where's My Water?, you won't regret it.