Aramation Games

World of Goo is one of the most innovative puzzlers to hit the PC in a long time. Your goal is to guide these goo balls to extraction point by basically turning goo balls into scaffolding. Each stage gives you a required number of balls to save and if you fail, you need to start from the beginning. Core gameplay depends heavily on physics and gravity as you combine goo balls together in a towering structure, you will quickly realize gravity is not your friend. Since the structure is made of, well, goo, it is very jiggly and unstable. It is up to you to determine how much risk you’re willing to take vs. building a pretty stable structure in order to save an extra goo. A goo ball that you use for construction probably won’t be saved at the end of the stage.

There are other types of goo balls apart from the regular black goo: green goos can be moved and detached from built structure, white goos drip down, red goos can float, yellow goos can stick to vertical surfaces as well as horizontal, and skull goos are impervious to spikes. At later missions, it becomes a challenge to quickly and properly use all these different goos in order to reach the end. The game requires a lot of trials and errors if you do not plan your structure properly.

Unfortunately, the game is marred by control issues: you click on a goo, and drag it to where you want to place it. However this becomes infuriating when the time is running out, your structure is toppling, and you grab the wrong goo as they scurry about on the structure you’ve just built. The game also has an undo function when you click on a time fly that’s buzzing around your structure. It is sometimes too easy to click on them by mistake instead of selecting a goo.

In the end, the charming visuals and physics-based puzzles will give you a very different experience. You’ll soon fall in love with those goos.

Rating: 80%

It is really tough to call flOw a puzzle game as there are no set challenges, objectives or game mechanic. Think of it as a more tranquil version of snake, as you "play" as a sea organism bent on gobbling up everything in its path. Each stage has a set number of smaller geometric organisms that you eat to increase your size. You can also go above one level, or below one level for other organisms to eat. As you go deeper, organisms bigger than you will try to eat you. Not that it matters as the game doesn’t track any score whatsoever so there is no penalty for, well, anything.

As a game, flOw fails miserably. As an interactive screensaver, it is gorgeous to look at as the animation is very fluid. Compared the PS3 version, this PSP port suffers from a little slowdown (especially in multiplayer). If you’ve never experienced flOw, you can do no wrong with PSP version… however I strongly recommend you skip this little overglorified piece of screensaver and opt for something meatier. After all, you will get bored of looking at blue sea populated by white geometric shapes really fast.

Rating: 10%

There are plenty of puzzle games on Sony’s PSP and the latest puzzle compilation is actually a port of PS3 game called “Go! Puzzle” (go figure). It is actually misleading since there are 3 different puzzle games rolled into 1 package.

In Skyscraper, you must climb to the top of the building by clearing each floor. The way you do it is by navigating from left to right by stepping on the same colored tiles only. It is a timed event, so you must do this pretty fast or else start from the bottom of the building again. Swizzle Blocks task you with forming a square of 4 colored tiles to clear them. Occasionally, new blocks will be added from the left and from the right of the playing field, and you must rotate the tiles to clear them. Last game in the package is Aquatica where different colored mines drop from the top and you must form vertical or diagonal lines of 3 same colored mines to explode them.

Overall, there is nothing wrong with these games, but Go! Puzzle PSP doesn’t contain any new exciting additions to the puzzle games. These are just average games and you’ll be mildly entertained for the first few minutes. The only one with lasting value is Skyscraper as it involves a fair amount of strategy. If you want to clear blocks, I recommend you get Lumines or Lumines II instead.

Rating: 35%

Downstream Panic! is part Lemmings and part LocoRoco, and it doesn’t invent new puzzle genre, it is a merely competent one held back by some design choices. In Downstream Panic!, you must guide 100 fish in each level that usually start from the top of the level, to the bottom of the level where there is a body of water. The catch is, the terrain those fish must navigate through needs some help from you, the player. Your arsenal includes plant barriers, missiles, fans, nets and baits. Early levels are pretty simple, requiring 1 to 3 basic tools. However, as you progress through the included 80 levels, it becomes apparent that your strategy must be well planned even before you hit the start button.

Around level 10, the difficulty increases so much that you will rarely get through in the first try, or in the first ten tries. Managing your arsenal, dealing with time issues, and constantly scrolling up and down the map becomes frustrating pretty fast.

Ultimately this mix of Lemmings and LocoRoco is recommended only for the die-hard fan of Lemmings as the challenge level is too great on this otherwise cutesy game.

Rating: 60%

If you have read my review for SimCity: Societies, you would have realized city zoning was removed from the game. Now it has turned up in The Sims Carnival SnapCity which is, surprisingly enough, not a Sims game nor a Sim City game. Instead it is a perverse puzzle casual game that just borrows elements from both franchises.

You’re in charge of building a city, and this city is built by falling blocks. You must fill an area with same colored blocks (green for residential, yellow for industrial and blue for commercial). The more areas you fill up, you get more tax revenue. And with your tax revenue, you use social services: if there’s a fire, you spend money to put out the fire. If there’s a riot, you spend money by deploying SWAT forces, and so forth. Of course you need to build roads to make sure those filled areas develop, and bulldoze decaying buildings. Some special areas allow you to construct attractions and services buildings such as a police station, municipal parks, or even gas stations that effect surrounding neighbourhoods.

It all sounds interesting, but the actual gameplay is incredibly repetitive and boring as all you do is direct where falling blocks will go. There are no strategies involved, and after a few missions, you’ll realize not too many new concepts are being introduced to make grinding worthwhile. In the later missions, all that changes is there are more requirements (such as no abandoned buildings, certain number of trees, building certain structures…) thrown at you just to make it more “challenging”.

At $19.99, some could consider this purchase but instead, spend the same amount of money and get SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition which will guarantee you a lot more strategy and fun city building.

Rating: 25%

[Download 1 hour free trial]

Spelling Challenges and More! is, as you can deduce, a spelling game. I’m still unsure why they decided to put “More” as there is absolutely nothing more than just spelling challenges. As you’d expect from a spelling challenge game, your goal is to spell words. There are typical spelling bee (listen to audio and spell the word), find the correctly spelled word, jig letters around to spell a word, picking nouns and such. There are about 100 levels of challenge, as you progress through harder and harder words.

It is certainly a budget title, and it shows as the main game is played on a pink/red background with yellow/gold letters. There are no other backgrounds, animated cutscenes nor cinematics. Not that a spelling game needs all that, but if you’re going to pay for a spelling game, wouldn’t you want something more than what can be done as a free Flash game? If you want your children to learn how to spell while pretending to play a videogame, this is a perfect Christmas purchase. Everybody else should just stay clear.

Rating: 25%

It looks like avoiding Lumines has become virtually impossible thanks to its release on PC. Already available on PSP (Lumines, Lumines II), Xbox 360 (Lumines Live!), and PS2 (Lumines Plus), PC version retains all the charms of the original creation, now dating back to year 2005.

Gameplay is as simple as ever: a block composed of 4 colored squares drop from the top and you must guide it so you form an one-colored block of at least 4 squares. Line passes through the playing field from left to right, and these blocks disappear once the line passes over them.

What’s addictive about Lumines is the sight and the sounds. Each stage features different backgrounds and sounds that react to your playing. The more you play, the more stages you unlock and it’s always a pleasure to find yourself in a stage you haven’t seen before.

If you’ve never played Lumines before on any of the platforms, give the PC version a try as it is a faithful interpretation of the core concepts. You can try the game or buy it from WildTangent (unfortunately) here .

Rating: 90%

Casual gaming market shows no signs of slowing down, and the biggest drug pusher is PopCap games. Their new release Peggle is an odd mix of Japanese-style pachinko and pinball. You launch metal balls from the top in order to clear the pegs in the playing field. In all, it is a very simplistic experience since once you launch the ball, you let gravity take effect and hope your metal ball goes where pegs are still around. Of course in order to master this game, you need to think about ricochet, shot angles and special powers. Special powers range everything from a fireball that’ll go through the pegs without bouncing off, to simple flippers at the both sides of the field which you can use to attempt to clear more pegs.

Simple game mechanics are packaged with very… trippy graphics. The game is dominated by flowers, unicorns (yes, unicorns), dragons, golden lotuses and even talking frogs.

Once you can get over the sugary graphics, you’ll find that this is a great game since it will suck all your free time. Oftentimes, whether you succeed in a level depends on pure luck as the bouncing ball’s trajectory cannot be reasonably anticipated at the beginning. Which would make the experience very frustrating in other games… except Peggle’s charm dictates you to try again and push your luck further to clear all orange pegs. Once you’re done with the main quest mode (yes, there is a quest mode), you can complete challenges where you’re given an increasingly tough objectives.

[Click here to play the online game for free or buy full version]

Score: 80%