Just Half

It’s 50/50.

Reviewing Apps and assigning scores is a tricky thing. There are gross volumes of apps with an amazing variety of price points, development efforts, game types and goals. Settling on a strength of recommendation for an App is a game in itself, and Just Half makes it a little bit easier at 5/10. Of course, in Just Half that comes out perfect.

Just Half features very focused gameplay: using your finger divide a rectangle in half. This gameplay is spread across two modes, Just Half and Perfect Half. In the latter, you strive for an even 50%, and can hit retry as oft as you like. Not particularly engaging, Perfect Half functions as a training ground for the title’s primary mode.

Just Half is the bulk of the game and has lives acquired through Excellent ratings (achieving very close to 50%, like less than 50.999999) and lost through Bad ratings (anything more than 52%). Scattered onscreen are markers that you must cross as you bisect the rectangle in one cut. Higher levels mean more markers and greater difficulty as their placement in the space makes an even split harder to achieve. These markers aren’t without reason or design, some level targets result in silhouette images, like that of a human profile.

Once you lose all those lives you’re back to the beginning. There is no save, so you’ll be replaying those easy stages over and over. The difficulty ramps up pretty quickly, and without a level select or the hands of a neurosurgeon many players won’t be seeing the more interesting challenges at all.

Just Half’s green and black style has retro appeal, and the ambient techno music manages to check the “audio” box without messing with your concentration. You can go about dividing the space however you want, so long as it’s half. The controls are necessarily very precise, but getting a “Bad!” rating still carries with it some feeling of injustice. I mean, really, 52% is “Bad!”? That’s hardcore, but with so simple a premise hardcore is what the game boils down to.

What Just Half ends up being is a lot of isn’t – there isn’t a worldwide leader board, there isn’t a list of achievements, there isn’t anything to unlock, there isn’t more to it than just half. That means you’re either going to think Just Half is just enough, or not, and the odds are about 50/50.

Review copy provided by publisher.