I’ve had the chance to play around with a new iOS puzzle game the last couple of days, and I’ve been really satisfied with what I’ve seen. What better way to cap off the summer with sharing it with you?

Fractal: Make Blooms, Not War is creative spin on the “match hexagons” subset of puzzlers, which include classics like Hexic. Instead of rotating tiles to match colours, you use an action called “pushing” to spawn new tiles by tapping on blank spaces. Each adjacent tile to the empty space you tapped will be pushed outward, and a tile will be created behind it. You’re encouraged to create “blooms” (six tiles surrounding one in the center) to clear pieces away, start combos and rack up points.

This game is deceptively difficult, which I believe is paramount to any puzzle game. By adding different power ups, multiple colors per board and a limited amount of pushes, the game turns from a simple “move things until they explode” strategy to one which makes you consider where you are, what you can do and where those actions will take you.

Modes of play are divided into a Campaign, Puzzle and Arcade mode, with the first giving you a number of levels to conquer by score, the second giving you a limited number of moves and the last simply telling you to survive.

Each are well-balanced and encourage a different method of playing, which is the whole point of different modes: Arcade, for example, gives you an infinite amount of pushes, but a one-minute timer to replenish by clearing certain tiles. Campaign, however, mixes it up with tile limitations, quotas to hit and different colours.

What really gets me about this title is the depth of the puzzling, as I’ve failed more than a few levels do to bad push placement. Like Tetris, it’s very easy to access a “basic” level of playing, but eventually you start to recognize patterns of play that yield to better combos; I find that eliminating tiles from the middle, then pushing in from the edges of the arena tend to work wonders.

Perhaps most importantly, this game will only cost you $1.99 in the App Store, which I consider a bargain. However, it’s only available on the iPad device at the moment, which kind of limits its reach. However, with such big playing fields and gorgeous graphics, it’s one of those games that just needs a larger screen in order to show itself off.

Fractal does not use Game Center, instead going with cross-platform OpenFeint support. However, this is currently down at the moment due to some firmware issues causing crashes. Props to the developer for taking a feature out that was causing people problems.

All in all, I can recommend Fractal highly; as a guy who likes puzzle games, I’m happy to report that there are people taking the genre in new directions - not just damned Bejewelled clones.

Fractal: Make Blooms, Not War can be found in the app store for $1.99.