Backyard Bounce follows the same template as the first Angry Birds; solve puzzle, clear stage, etc. But the best thing about Backyard Bounce is that, it really challenges you to to beat the game.

The puzzles are well designed and you encounter some incredibly tough ones that require a lot of thinking to beat it.

The premise is simple; put the basketball into the hoop. Now, it isn’t that simple, though, as you have to guide it into the hoop. How you create a path for the basketball to travel and end up inside the hoop is the hard part.

There is a good tutorial at the start, which explains the basic gameplay mechanics. It’s as if the developers knew, gamers will get stuck in this game a lot.

You are given a wooden plank and a triangle shaped thing-y to create a path, and you can also manipulate the direction of those items to guide the ball to its destination.

I faltered a lot at the start, so either I’m getting bad at these puzzle games, or this game is incredibly hard. I… umm, pick the latter one, obviously.

As you keep playing you will get a lot of items to guide the ball. Things like springs, bowling ball, wheels etc. come in handy later on, but increases the difficulty a lot. There are 72 stages available here, and considering the fact that the game is priced 0.99$, this is such a good value for money.

I say this because, the physics based platforming here really excels a lot.

After you clear a level, your performance is reviewed, like usual and you go to the next level. There is a twist here though. Each game with such a template had you collecting things before ending the level, so the thing you have to collect here are, whistles.

If you collect them all and clear the level then you get 100% completion, but you already know that, right?

You can clear levels using different methods, you aren’t locked to a single thing here, which is quite great. This is how people should design iOS games, instead of throwing miserable and pointless games at you. This game is quite tough, and requires you to put an effort to beat it, and for that, a good score is deserved.

This game was reviewed on the iPad 2.