An explosion at a nuclear power plant is trouble for everyone, essentially. That’s why, for David Kelly’s new iPhone game app, Coretex, as one of the engineers of a nuclear power plant, it’s imperative that you help cool down a reactor core that’s been drained of coolant before it explodes and kills millions.

There are two game modes with varying levels of difficulty to choose from: Avert Disaster (working as fast as you can to cool the entire core down) and Emergency Evac (delaying the inevitable rupture as long as possible). To save the people, you use a modified core inspection robot to cool the uranium rods in two ways: Cool and Transfer, found in the lower left hand corner. Repeated tapping of either button cools connected rods or balances the temperature between connected rods, respectively. The robot itself is comprised of the Outer Claw (with the arrows on either side) and the Center Claw; tap the Center Claw to switch positions with the Outer Claw, drag the Outer Claw with your fingertip to rotate it around from rod to rod. Heater bots can clamp onto a rod to raise its temperature more rapidly—you have to knock them off with the robot in order to save the rod. If the core temperature hits its maximum or you lose four rods, the game is over. To keep track of all the rods, there is a diagram in the middle of the bottom panel, or you can pinch the screen to get an overview of the core.

The Coretex iPhone game was a bit confusing in the beginning. Moving the robot was easy to grasp, as was destroying the Heater bots, but the instructions were not clear on the fact that you’d have to continuously tap on the Cool and Transfer buttons in order to achieve a drop in temperature; in fact, the Transfer button seems nearly useless. After starting the game, there was no engagement of interest, as you are just sitting there endlessly repeating the same motions over and over again. The graphics and controls are great, but that wasn’t enough to warrant further play. That said, Cortex is a free app so you should go grab it and try it out for yourself, as your results may vary.

Here is a video demo of the Coretex app on the iPhone

This 3rd Party App is available at the Apple iTunes AppStore. Browse the full list of all AppStore apps filed under the AppStore category.