Chainz
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| Chainz

In the early 1980s Coca Cola, maker of the Most Popular Soft Drink In The World™, decided to freshen up its product to fend off increasing competition from upstart Pepsi. On April 23rd 1985, it changed the sacred formula – which had remained virtually unchanged (erm, apart from the removal of cocaine) for the previous century – and unleashed New Coke on the world.

The unprecedented backlash from consumers and the industry alike was so fierce that by July 10th the old recipe was reinstated. The 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' adage had claimed another victim.

In the world of casual puzzle games, Chainz is very much New Coke, although you wouldn't necessarily notice from a brief taste test. On the face of it, the latest web-to-mobile conversion from RealArcade adheres to the classic formula of twitch puzzlers.

You're faced with a grid packed full of coloured links and have to twist them in order to form chains. Get three or more links in a row and (in strict obeyance with the unspoken laws of the puzzle universe) the chain disappears, enabling the links above to fall into their place.

Sprinkle in a few special bonus elements such as rainbows that links different colours or links with letters (spelling out CHAINZ) and some chain reaction combos and it seems like a case of so far, so Tetris, Bejeweled or Jewel Quest.

Digest the game for a little longer, however, and you'll notice that the ingredients have been subtly altered and cut with elements of the more strategic puzzle genre.

For starters, there's no time limit to battle with here. In fact, you can take as long as you want to make the requisite connections to fill the progress bar. Your enemy in Chainz is instead the reducing permutations of links – run out of chains to make and it's game over.

This seems pretty superfluous in the opening stages, but as you progress the number of possible moves begins to rapidly thin out, and the strategic element bubbles move more prominently to the surface.

This is compounded by the 90-degree nature of the connections. As you can only make connections on one axis, in order to generate chain reactions or just set up the next level of connections you need to ensure all the relevant links are twisted in the appropriate direction, and not in such a way that they'll make other connections that could scupper your best laid plans.

The resulting game thus adds an increasingly pronounced cerebral twist into the pattern recognition action, and it's here that players may find themselves complaining of a New Coke-style bitter aftertaste. Whilst the mixture is refreshing to begin with, as the levels progress and the strategic element is more pronounced, the whole becomes far less sweet.

In the absence of any change in level design and precious few innovations in terms of extra links or bonus features, the effort to reward ratio steepens sharply, with the only real payback for the ever tougher variations on a theme coming via the score box.

Hence, although there's nothing essentially wrong with Chainz – and indeed for the first hour or so of play it offers a flavoursome and a refreshing alternative to the puzzle theme – sooner or later the experience falls a little flat. To put it another way, when compared to RealArcade's classic puzzlers such as Pile Up, Luxor or 7 Wonders, it just doesn't feel like the real thing.

Chainz

A twist on the traditional puzzle formula that's refreshing initially, but lacks long-term appeal
Score
Chris James
Chris James
A footy game fanatic and experienced editor of numerous computing and game titles, bossman Chris is up for anything – including running Steel Media (the madman).