Ka-Glom!
|
| Ka-Glom!

It must be quite hard to be someone tasked with developing a new puzzle game, particularly when you're constrained by the limitations of a mobile phone handset and all you can think of is dropping blocks and matching colours. Honestly, we don't know how they do it.

Well, alright, we do. But you know what we mean. It's why nearly every single puzzle game that's released today rests on one of those two foundations, if not both.

Still, there's some fresh juice to be squeezed from even these traditional staples, and Ka-Glom! is evidence of this.

Looking about as original as a pair of blue jeans, things don't seem terribly promising to begin with. There's little explanation of what's to follow and, as you begin the Normal mode, the lack of any sort of tutorial leaves you apprehensive. The situation is not improved when you notice that the objects dropping from the top of the screen come in two varieties.

But it's now that you realise that Ka-Glom! is a little bit different. Not only do you get coloured blocks that work in the standard fashion, piling on top of each other and behaving in a largely inanimate way – you also get coloured blobs. And these blobs are explosive. Once enough of them are combined, they reach a critical point at which they combust.

Once they go, they take themselves and any adjacent similarly-coloured blocks with them. The magic number when it comes to those blobs is four, though you'll need to take care when positioning them because they'll only merge together vertically and horizontally. And they steadfastedly refuse to bond through blocks, even those of their own colour.

This all means that you need to keep an eye on the build up of both the blobs and blocks, because if either reach the top of the screen, your game is over. In the normal game mode you'll find that you hit this wall after around a dozen well-graduated levels and after two new colours have been added to the mix. Whether you return to this way of playing again, though, is questionable because when you've tried Ka-Glom!'s Puzzle mode, you won't want to play anything else.

There are around 100 such set-pieces to work your way through, where a different collection of carefully arranged blocks and blobs are already waiting for you in each level. It's up to you to clear them all using only the blobs and blocks available to you, which range from a single coloured pair of blobs to a half-dozen or so pre-determined mixes of the two.

Given a few seconds to work out where you'll drop what, the effects of a perfectly positioned placement can be spectacular, with chain reactions firing across the screen and everything in sight disappearing in a cloud of flashes and stars.

And it's in this mode where the real long-term enjoyment of Ka-Glom! can be found; the more deliberate approach it demands lifts the game above the usual puzzle fare. Indeed, there's just one fault preventing it from being an outright classic and that's a clunky set of controls.

Considering that you only need to move the falling objects left or right and rotate them by pressing in on your handset's directional pad, this might sound slightly ridiculous, but the problem stems from the fact that if you hold down left or right, the block or blob in question will only move one space over. To move several spaces across, you need to repeatedly press in that direction.

That doesn't sound severe, but in reality it is. Positioning takes longer than it should and, when time's tight as the headroom diminishes, you'll be cursing under your breath as the game becomes more difficult than it should be.

This annoyance is minimised in the Puzzle mode, thankfully, leaving much of the appeal of Ka-Glom! intact, so if you're after a more thoughtful puzzle game than is usual, we can still heartily recommend it.

Ka-Glom!

Slightly dodgy controls can't spoil the fun offered by this challenging yet engaging game
Score