Slice It! from developer Com2uS is a new puzzle game where you must dissect various shapes into equal parts. It may sound painfully simple, and can be if you’re just dealing with straight circles and squares. But Slice It! throws some seriously crazy shapes at you that will have you scratching your head in how to approach them. A hint system helps prevent you from getting stuck on some of the harder shapes, and a nice five star scoring system urges you to retry puzzles in an effort to get a perfect score. With 60 levels to tackle, and room for more to be added in the future, Slice It! provides a surprising amount of slicing fun.

Right off the bat you’ll notice that Slice It! has a very nice presentation, utilizing a hand drawn colored pencil look with graphics enhanced for iPad and Retina Display. Levels are displayed in groups of twenty on a stage select screen, and are unlocked one after the other as you complete them. There are five tabs on the side to select the different groups of levels, though only the first three currently have content. Tapping the fourth and fifth hints that more levels should be coming in future updates. It’s slightly annoying to see these empty tabs in the game, but the 60 levels are more than enough to occupy most gamers attention for a good amount of time.

When you select a level, the shape that must be sliced is drawn for you. Touching a point outside of the shape anchors a starting point for the slicing line, and dragging across the shape gives you a dotted line of where the slice will take place. The real trick to Slice It! is that you must slice the shape into the required amount of segments for each level, as well as use up all of the slicing lines. This can call for some more creative thinking, even with basic shapes. Once you’ve fulfilled the segment and slice line requirements, the shape is sliced up, and you are graded on how accurately you can get each segment to be the same percentage of the entire shape. For example, a square cut into fourths would require each segment to be as close to 25% of the entire shape as possible to earn 5 stars.

If you slice too many segments, don’t use all your slices, or have segments that are a much different proportion than the rest then you will fail the level and have to retry. If you do well and get 5 stars on a stage, you earn a hint to be used on one of the future stages. Each hint will tell you where a slice line needs to go to get you started, and in my experience with some of the more odd shapes, the hints can be invaluable.

A couple of small issues stick out in Slice It!. For starters, it can be hard to accurately place the anchor point on the iPhone’s smaller screen, and I sometimes found myself having to try multiple times to get a line started where I needed it to. Related to this, if you draw a line and decide it’s not where you want it to be, you can drag the end point of the line back to the starting point to not draw a line at all. Unfortunately the game often ends up drawing the line anyway, which can easily be erased with the undo button but is annoying nonetheless. Finally, sometimes multiple slice lines can intersect in the middle of a shape and cause a very tiny segment to be made, unbeknownst to you until you actually try to complete the level. This causes you to have to retry the level since that extra segment goes over the requirement.

These are all minor issues in an otherwise fun game, and merely serve to annoy rather than ruin the overall enjoyment of Slice It!. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed playing, and there is a strong “one more try” factor when aiming to get the most equal segment proportions possible. Even when I had already achieved 5 stars, I found myself retrying a level anyway just to see if I could get exactly equal segments purely for my own satisfaction. Players in our forums are enjoying the game as well, and if you’re looking for a new type of puzzle game with a charming style that’s easy to pick up and play, take a look at Slice It!.