Frog Burst
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| Frog Burst

When I was a kid, I used to hear stories about the unpleasant things you could do with frogs. I remember that one particularly alarming tale revolved around straws, insertion, and the act of blowing.

If you ever recounted the story to an adult - or anyone with a functioning moral compass - they would screw up their features in disgust and tell you never to entertain such revolting notions.

Years later, I find myself reviewing a game called Frog Burst, the central theme of which is to clear levels by blowing up as many frogs as humanly possible. Suck on that, conscientious objectors.

Gross though the premise might sound (and is), it serves as a vehicle for a puzzle title that's well-presented, clearly defined, and actually rather enjoyable.

Webbed feat

The predictably irrelevant setup is as follows: you are a scientist who has accidently contaminated a local lake, turning its froggy inhabitants into cold-blooded killers.

To correct this terrible mistake, you must kill every mutated amphibian you can find by feeding them a growth chemical until they reach critical mass and pop like slimy green balloons.

Your muderous mission takes the form a grid-based logic puzzle. Armed with a pipette containing a limited number of drops, you must use the substance as a catalyst to start a chain reaction that will eliminate every frog on-screen.

Over-inflated frogs will pop after a single droplet, sending green pellets flying across the horizontal and vertical axis. These pellets will prompt other similarly-inflated frogs to burst upon contact.

Some frogs are regular-sized, while others are barely tadpoles. The smaller - or less swollen - the frog, the more drops or pellets you’ll require to rend its fragile form in twain.

Once you pop, you can't stop

You can complete many of Frog Burst's 75 levels with one carefully chosen droplet. The more densely populated stages erupt in a guiltily satifying display of frog-on-frog violence.

The difficulty goes up and down - I breezed through many of the first 25 levels in one attempt, but found myself stuck for some time on the 11th level, which seemed a little odd.

The one-droplet solutions are always the easiest - sometimes embarrassingly so. Six-drop levels have so many variables that they can prove a serious challenge, however, meaning you have to plot your moves carefully and make evey drip count.

There are a couple different enemy types to deal with: the monocular bullfrog releases only one pellet on impact, while blue frogs take out everything in the adjacent squares without releasing any projectiles.

Though the enemy classes are few in number, the developer uses them efficiently, resulting in a relatively straightforward but perfectly serviceable little timesink.

Frog Burst

More thoughtful than its lurid subject matter might suggest, Frog Burst does enough to warrant you hopping on for the duration
Score
James Gilmour
James Gilmour
James pivoted to video so hard that he permanently damaged his spine, which now doubles as a Cronenbergian mic stand. If the pictures are moving, he's the one to blame.