Puzzlegeddon

Puzzlegeddon.  First it’s ‘puzzle’-ing, soon it’ll be ‘geddon’ on your nerves.

Well… this is probably the first time I’ve played a game, then actually had to play the tutorial to understand the game.  This game is very deceiving! It looks all sweet and innocent on the outside, but on the inside… evil.  A little like thinking you’re eating a minstrel but end up eating a chocolate coated peanut that sends you into anaphyalctic shock.

Puzzlegeddon is a puzzle game type thing in which you use a six-by-six grid as your colourful, box filled playing field. Imagine something slightly similar to ‘Yoshi’s Cookie’ on the SNES.  Now imagine something exactly the same – that’s pretty much the ‘puzzle’ part of ‘Puzzlegeddon’.  You can move the cursor to any row or column and move it by holding down the A Button and moving the Left Thumb Stick. Then the idea is to get at least 5 of the same colour boxes, and once you have done that, you can explode them using the X Button, which makes them disappear, and is used to fill up one of 4 coloured gauges.

Each color indicates an offensive or defensive power that you can use against your robot opponents. The red gauge is for your attacks, the yellow gauge is for disrupting an AI bot, the blue gauge boosts your abilities  and the green gauge is your defense.  If the explanation sounds a little dry and dull, it’s the latest John Grisham thriller in comparison to actually playing the thing.  No, that’s a bit harsh.  Actually, sod it, it ate into my ‘Modern Warfare 2’ playing time.

Each gauge also has three sections, so the more boxes you group together and make disappear to fill the gauges, the bigger and better your offense or defense ability will be. So if you fill up one section of the red gauge, you get one little missile that does about as much damage as Bruce Forsythe in a Kung Fu competition . Fill up two sections, and you will get a much  stronger attack.  And if you fill it up to the very top… you will send out a missile that will then send out its own little missiles of destruction to beat down the AI bot foes. Unfortunately in the main game, there’s only one of you, and three of them – and even on the first levels they seem to go all Mike Tyson on you.  Which would be OK if this was a boxing game, but it’s not – you’re the nerdy kid in glasses at the back of the class – and they’re all Mike Tyson.

There are two game types. Solo Brawl puts you against bots in either a Deathmatch which you earn points for defeating any of your opponent bots, or a Battle Royale, be the last one standing, and not have your head explode due to a wired up neck collar. OK so there are no neck collars capable of a messy decapitation – which is a shame, as it might actually make the game entertaining.  I would love a puzzle game where if your intellect was so impressive, the other opponents head would blow up, like in ‘Scanners’. The games can get quite manic, and if you happen to ‘fudge up’, you can complete certain challenges to get you put back in the game, and in true Blackadder II style, “vreak your rewenghee!”.

The other game is called Poison Peril, and is more about the puzzle majiggy side of the game. Here, you’re given a set of challenges. Matching a certain pattern like getting rid of only the bonus skulls in as few moves as possible, and this is down to only having a set number of precious moves allowed.  There are lots of settings you can mess around with to make things harder, or ‘harder-er’, such as how many nasty bots you want to give a beating and how hard you want the bots to be. There are also plenty of achievements to be found within all modes of the game.