Puyo Pop Fever (Nintendo DS) Review

One thing the game never seems to go wrong on is the visuals. Many may think that purely because the graphics do not pop out and hit you in the face with their beauty that they are in fact quite bland. Well, for a fast-paced, totally manic puzzler the cute, simple-looking Puyos are perfect. More importantly, the game never slows down, ruining the action. There are prettily coloured backgrounds and pleasingly drawn characters with an easy to grasp interface. Basically, it does everything it should do in this department! As for the audio side, the tunes are bright and breezy for the most part, the same as with the GBA edition. The exception here is that the DS game has far more speech included, although it sometimes sounds muffled and hearing some repeated voices during puzzle battles can grow annoying very quickly.

Puyo Puyo Pop Fever sticks to the tried-and-tested puzzle formula of lining up a certain number of similar coloured objects (in this case four or more funny little coloured blobs) in a horizontal or vertical plane to make them disappear. The blobs drop from the top of the screen at a progressively increasing speed and you must do your utmost to hang on, clearing as many lines as possible, in order to beat your opponent.

However, there are other aspects to prevent it from becoming stale and too much of an identikit puzzle title. Okay, so PPF does not use the dual-screens for gameplay enhancements, but it does try to incorporate touch-screen functionality. Yet despite the welcomed effort, its clumsy execution will lead you straight back to old-fashioned button and directional pad controls in no time at all!

Rather than just vertical or horizontal lines, though, when four or more like colours touch in any way they then disappear and if you end up with a big enough clearance or combination of lines cleared, blank blobs will be hurled onto the opponent's screen, causing massive damage in general! The clear blobs can only be removed when a set of like colours are connected whilst touching the clear ones, making life extremely awkward when the screen is already filling up at a rapid rate.

On top of this, there is the Fever aspect, which when triggered changes your screen to a preset batch of puyo blobs that can all be cleared in a huge chain of combination clearances with the right placement of the falling duo. This, if done properly, results in a cataclysmic array of see-through blobs smashing onto the opponent's side, which can turn the tides of play radically and adds a large amount of fun to the proceedings, especially when done against the annoying computer characters when playing through the extremely twee magic school-style story mode! And if that does not grab your interest, you can instead choose to play endlessly on your own in a traditional sense, a mission mode and a constant fever mode!

Puzzle games, if of a decent quality, can last you a lifetime in small bursts. Puyo Pop Fever is just that sort of game, with the urge to come back and tackle the computer or a friend repeatedly, beating your own time and scores, as well as humiliating a human opponent where necessary! In addition, there is the added bonus of being able to use just one DS card to access eight-player battles. Okay, it may take quite a while to load up, but it sure does add some great value for money to the package! Once up and running, there are different rule to choose from, with the option of creating your being there as well. Had this been created this year then it would have likely included online Wi-Fi support, but unfortunately it missed the boat.