Game Impressions
If you like adorable itty-bitty-widdle fluffy, chirping chicklets exploding in a shower of feathered carnage, look no further. As if it's not obvious already, this app is just painfully cute; the rendering, animation, soundtrack, and particle effects are just perfect. Birzzle is so goddamn cute it'll make your teeth cry.
This is not your mama's match-3, either, no sir, it is not. It's more akin to Pokemon Puzzle League and its brilliant predecessor, Tetris Attack, than anything else. Don't get too excited, though, because it's primarily the game mechanic in which you very hastily rearrange chick/blocks in order to align with he upper row of incoming blocks, that I'm referring to.
The movement is much more dynamic than TA (the game, not the website that some people seem to be so enamored with). You don't swap two static blocks, you drag any block with an open face anywhere else that is open. Not to any location, as with Chain3, but again, to blocks with an open face. Imagine several stacks of wooden children's blocks (not children that are wooden, that would be an altogether different game) that you have to quickly rearrange and stack together to form adjacent groups of 3 or more matching colors. A match-3 disappears, a match of 4 and up will form one of a number of special blocks. These blocks are pretty much what you would expect, explode adjacent, clear whole lines, and a crazy black hole that sucks the ornery little buggers into the void.
All of these elements mesh together nicely to form a whirlwind of frantic drag 'n drops, feathers flying, and kooky squawking. OMG, the fricking ring-a-ding ding noise when the stack nears the top could quite possibly give you an insta-aneurysm. This team obviously likes Nintendo, because this is almost as annoying as that screaming baby bubble from Yoshi's Island. The first thing I'm doing, when I finish o,ff these comments, is look for a sound fx mute. That is my primary complaint really. The other issue is that the game is all about setting up combos, but when you create superhewg matches, it leaves a new block to bork your combo and when you later try to use that bork-block in a combo, your killer setup explodes into chicken giblet shrapnel.
I like the game, some won't, but there are Game Center Leaderboards and 52 Achievements, which is no small number, and it's really quite entertaining, IMO. If you're on the fence...ahem...try the lite.
Last edited by djflippy; 04-06-2011 at 02:13 AM..
Reason: italics
|
04-05-2011, 11:31 PM
Linear Mode
