Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage is a challenging physics-based puzzle game in which you need to free the vikings that are trapped in the ice.

Ice-cutting puzzle fun

Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage is great fun to play. The premise of the game is that vikings have been left stranded across more than 140 levels. Your mission is to solve the puzzles to guide them onto your boat by chopping ice blocks, cutting ropes, setting off cannons and splicing through slime.

Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage is a real challenge. Each puzzle can usually only be solved in one way and your knowledge of angles and physics will come into play. Besides the standard levels, there are unlockable side quests, which help to diversify the gameplay.

Free the vikings

Icebreaker makes good use of touch gestures in its controls. For example, you swipe to cut the ice, two-finger hold and drag to move around the screen and double tap to zoom into a particular location. It works very well, although the instructions aren't as clear as they could be and a lot of the gameplay you have to figure out for yourself. Maybe we've just been spoiled by today's world of introductory tutorial levels!

Journey into the ice world

The worlds in which Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage is set look fantastic. The backdrops are imaginative and the game's visuals really pull you in. There's a certain amount of crude pixelation of the sprites and some of the objects, and it's hard to know if this is a deliberate design characteristic or just slapdash design. Either way, it gives Icebreaker bags of charm and character.

There are just three worlds at the moment and, as beautiful as they are, it would be nice to have some more locations to add a bit of diversity to the scenery in Icebreaker. I'm sure this is something the developer will be working on, since more worlds are already available in the iOS version. Icebreaker has all the right ingredients for a game saga that could be infinitely expandable, like Angry Birds.

The verdict

If you enjoy physics-based puzzle games, you'll find Icebreaker to be a charming and challenging treat.