Full Review

2 April 2004 - Yes, it’s another one of those brightly-coloured Japanese looking games, in which you get to challenge your friends to a game not dissimilar to Tetris. With that in mind, there isn’t much to say in a review of such a game, except that it’s surprisingly good. As normal, bright fun colours are the order of the day and some inane soundtrack to keep your ears busy. There are a number of characters to pick, each has a slightly different style and attack on your opponent - and they are the normally wacky onion-headed guy and giant purple fish and so on.

Basically, like Tetris, the pieces descend from the top of the screen, and you rotate and colour-match them to get the best fit with the existing rows below. The pieces are more like bubbles, and when you place like by like, they form a bigger bubble. Once you have four together, they pop - just as getting four pieces in a row Tetris led to them vanishing. The fun part is getting chains together - so that one set causes the surrounding bubbles to move and complete other sets so a huge chain reaction occurs clearing loads of the screen. This is part of the character differences of the game, and each character responds in some crazy Japanese way.

If, you’re doing particularly well during the course of the game, you might go into a 30-second special mode, where you are presented with lots of chains ready to go - slot in one piece correctly and trigger the whole lot - great fun and a real bane to your opponent who receives all the fallout. It takes a small degree of skill to get the best out of the opportunities, but having said that, there often isn’t the time to think too far in advance.

VERDICT
Overall, it is catchy and addictive. All these puzzle battle games rely on simplicity and Puyo Pop Fever is simple and fun - a game you can play for 10 minutes or 10 hours. It is suitable for all gamers, young and old. It follows in the footsteps of games like Bust-a-Move and Tetris, so in that respect, it’s not the most original puzzler we’ve seen, but fun nonetheless. Thumbs-up.