Battle Blocks

Battle Blocks is a Tetris-a-like but with some interesting little twists to make this worth having a crack at.

You play the character of Ogo who’s a battle droid who’s crash landed on an alien planet who must try and destroy all the blocks on the screen to prevent them destroying you as you try to escape the planet’s cruel gods. To eliminate blocks you have to place five or more blocks of the same colour beside each-other. On some levels they will instantly detonate and on others a lightning strike will come and zap them, causing them to explode.

The shapes are interesting in their design and break apart as they contact with an object (block) on its way down. This means that there’s plenty of interesting combinations and some logical thinking to be done to help get the blocks in the right place.

If this sounds pretty hard, it is, but not to worry – help is at hand! You have various explosive charges which eliminate blocks in vertical, horizontal, spiral or criss-cross fashion. Also when you crash-landed you have ‘moles’ which fall and gobble up blocks. This helps keep the screen quite clear, although they will sometimes munch up some of the connected blocks – which can mean you lose some bigger scores, but they do come in handy despite that fact.

You have plenty of levels to work your way through and the gods have quite a few tricks of their own up their sleeves. In some levels they flip the screen upside-down, in others you’ll be fighting furiously against the end of level boss. Some fly about at the top of the screen to obstruct your view, others will hide at the bottom making it hard for you to blast them away with the exploding blocks.

In the end you’ll be playing quite a while in the story mode, but should you like a quicker game then you can try your luck at the arcade mode instead. In either case, you’ll be really working quite hard to get a good hi-score.

With so many things going on, you’ll be probably a little confused as to how you’ll possibly win at times. However, you’ll manage to win as most games are very short and just when you’re getting stuck in, the level’s cleared and you’re rewarded by going to the next level. This is a bit negative as you get more from games when they present a bit more of a challenge.

Overall, this game tests your reactions, logic as well as puzzle solving skills throughout and will keep you entertained for hours. If you enjoyed playing Quadropop or Tetris then this will be certainly quite a fun game to get stuck in to.

Rating 83%

Positives

Good graphics

Entertaining and very tricky at points

Quite a few innovative ideas to keep the game fresh despite its very familiar feel

Addictive

Negatives

Quite repetitive

Every time you start the game you get reminded about the story – not so interesting by the 10^th time!

The story mode poses little challenge and you jump up levels very quickly