Battle Blocks

What does a block-arranging puzzler need to do to stand out nowadays? Destructive power-ups? An epic storyline, complete with boss battles? A healthy dose of elements borrowed from other successful games in the genre? A few unique gimmicks of its own?

It's a question the makers of Battle Blocks no doubt pondered while they were thinking up the game. It seems that their answer to that initial question was: all of the above. Battle Blocks throws everything into the mix in the hope of creating something memorable, but it comes out a little muddled instead.

At heart it's a fairly straight forward Tetris-style game of slotting falling blocks into place. These match up according to colour, and the variously shaped clusters succumb to gravity once they've landed, sliding apart to fill in the gaps in the field. Once you've matched five or more blocks of any one colour, they're ready to be zapped into oblivion.

This only occurs when a timed metre at the top left of the screen fills up, at which point a barrage of lightning incinerates any blocks that meet the above criteria. If that sounds at all familiar, it's because it's the central mechanic of the brilliant Lumines. Still, they say you should borrow from the best, so mixing elements of two of the genre's leading lights is no bad idea.

The developer has also decided to throw in a whole host of power-ups, as seen in any number of puzzlers. The trouble is, here they come along fairly regularly and seem ill integrated with the gameplay. Particularly early on in the game, you'll be ticking along at a steady pace, keeping the levels nice and low and generally getting along fine. The last thing you need is a bombardment of explosive ordinance, the energy of which is largely wasted.

It's also hard to keep up with what each power-up actually does, largely due to the similarity in appearance of some of them and the indiscriminate way in which they're thrown at you. The introduction of Cyber Moles - randomly wandering block-eating robots - adds another rather superfluous ingredient to the mix.

On the positive side, we do like the idea (yes, another one) for power-up activation, where you have to steer them through a particular area of the screen before a timer ticks down.

We should really bring in the Story mode now, as it's the main thrust of the game. Vivid has constructed a rather odd story around the abstract puzzling gameplay. The tale involves a disturbingly cute 'War Machine' named Ogo and his/its war against six powerful elemental gods, the sort you'd find getting up to mischief in your average ancient Greek yarn.

The contrasts are slightly jarring, between ancient myth and science fiction; cute art style and the lead character's constant war-mongering. It seems to be another case of the developer throwing everything at the wall and hoping that something will stick. While there's certainly a hint of originality about the story, it just doesn't gel together or with the rest of the game.

When you get down to actually playing the Story mode, however, it does have a welcome ebb and flow about it. You're constantly thrown new tasks to fulfil, such as destroying particular blocks or surviving for a set period of time as your opponent chucks single blocks your way. It can be a little confusing, but in this case the hyperactive switching between ideas definitely works at keeping you entertained.

Elsewhere you're given the endless Highscore mode and the Story mode-breakdown of Arcade mode to be getting on with.

The developers of Battle Blocks seem so eager to please with an endless list of ideas and features that they've forgotten the main, unifying aspect of the best examples of the genre. From Tetris to Lumines to Hexic, each successfully implements a simple central mechanic. Sadly, despite all the window dressing, Battle Blocks is at heart a distinctly average puzzle game.

Hopefully any sequel will concentrate on a couple of the elements that work and really build them up into fully fleshed features. Until then, you're best off sticking to the classics.