I’ve been a fan of House on Fox since the early days of the series, so I was intrigued when I found out a game based on the show was coming to the iPhone. While the TV show has a lot of twists and turns, this puzzle game is very straight forward and just slaps medical terminology on top.

House M.D. is a fun puzzle game at its core, where you have to eliminate certain “symptoms” from each of of the puzzle blocks until the single correct one remains. As you progress, the number of symptoms per block and number of blocks increase, making it a bit more difficult to solve each puzzle. To aid in your solution, each of House’s three staff members, Foreman, Thirteen, and Taub, can perform various medical tasks to give clues. You’re rated based on speed and how many clues used to solve the puzzle. Some nice features include Facebook integration where patient names are randomly pulled from your friends list each time you play and OpenFient integration and achievements.

The length of the game is very short. You can complete each of the game’s four puzzle difficulties in under a half hour. That’s it. There’s little incentive to go back and play again as you’ll see quickly see repeated interactions between House and his staff. In my first play-through, I got “A” ratings on each of the four difficulty settings, the highest you can get. There isn’t much left for me to do in the game.

For $2.99, it’s tough to recommend House M.D., even for fans of the show. Yes, the puzzle solving is fun, but it’s entirely too short and the text-based dialogue doesn’t give enough reason to play it again. Once this drops to $0.99, I’d say give it a whirl, but at full price, it’s not worth your money.

[A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.]