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Friday 8 February, 2008
Gameplay:
This time around I decided to try the online game. Very much the same, except the people online are better than computer opponents.
The replay value of this game is very high. I didn’t get bored of it for one second, and I was actively thinking about it the whole time I was playing (for both segments of gameplay). I also discovered many different types of strategies that a player can use to achieve victory. Here are a few:
1: Small, short attacks that constantly bombard the enemy with small, annoying dormant blocks to constantly screw them up.
2: Saving up for large crystals/combos (which require more space, and this can cause you to run out of room if you get messed up by the enemy’s dormant blocks) to attack your enemy with potential one-hit-KO attacks
3: Multiple medium-sized attacks that constantly stack layers of blocks on the enemy.
There are more, I’m sure I’ll discover them.
There is also a Crystal which appears rarely. When the crystal lands on top of a color, all blocks of that color are destroyed (This also gives you the same points and attack as if you had destroyed them with normal colored bombs).
The emergent gameplay style of this game creates so many situations and exceptions to probable fate. One round I played, I was incredibly close to dying (by having my blocks stack to the top), when I got a crystal just in time. I destroyed every red block on my screen, giving me a huge 3 chain-combo, along with 2 or 3 very large red crystals I had amassed. The enemy, who was winning one second before, was instantly destroyed, and I jumped for joy.
Design:
The game has a very arcade-anime style. The characters are all 2-D sprites, which would normally seem obsolete for the Xbox 360. However, this game is clearly not about graphics. The high-resolution gives it the feeling that it’s a new game (which it is), and the addicting gameplay pulls focus from the limited sprite animation. Sometimes the game reminds me of Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine (for the Sega Genesis), but it’s a much different game.
The challenges this game provides are very dynamic. Each situation in each game is different from the last game. Although there are patterns to be recognized, you never know where your enemy is going to throw dormant blocks on you. You always have to be ready.
I also had a friend come over to play on Local multiplayer, and we played 10 or 15 rounds without even realizing how long we were playing. We were very competitive and had a lot of fun beating each other back and forth. The game never got old, and the only reason we stopped was because it was 2 in the morning when we finished. Even with such a simple, seemingly non-humorous game, we were laughing nearly the whole time, saying things like, “Oh MAN I had the BEST combo coming up, you would have DIED, had you not BLOCKED IT!”
In many ways, this is one of the most fun and addicting games I’ve ever played. In fact, I want to play more right now.
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