When you read about the major rock performers of the last 50 years, you discover several common elements. They all abused substances, they all travelled endlessly in orgiastic tour buses, discarding used groupies like banana skins on the roadside, and they all – every last one of them – repeatedly arranged coloured
blocks in such a way that those of the same colour connected, flashed, and then disappeared.
No, really.
Rock 'n' Blocks is a vibrant work of fictional biography, placing you behind the axe of a young rocker making his way up the escalator of fame. Starting out a gifted hothead in Seattle, you have to make your way to New York via Las Vegas, San Diego, Denver, Houston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, recruiting bandmates and silencing detractors through the medium of puzzle.
Of course, the absurdity of the premise is intentional. The characters you have to face down emerge bombastically from kaleidoscoping backdrops like the protagonists of the eccentric
Elite Beat Agents on the DS, and they're framed by the same ornate theatrical arch that frames
Moulin Rouge's eccentric cast. It's bizarre, but it works.
Each of the locations you visit in
Rock 'n' Blocks comprises a variety of levels. Each takes place in the same rectangular well, and each employs the same array of coloured
blocks and powerups. But the levels are far from identical, and the variety that Gameloft spin from these tired components is the killer lick that rescues
Rock 'n' Blocks from soft-block puzzle banality.
The first of these games is a conventional
Tetris clone, in which the
blocks well up from the base of the screen rather than fall from the top. Along the bottom are coloured buttons indicating what colour of block, if any, will be coming next, and the object (as in all of these games) is to bring three or more colours together to clear them.
The challenge here is to predict how the
blocks will be dispersed once the unborn
blocks slide into view, and what a challenge it is. Only experienced or prodigious puzzle gamers will get their heads around it quickly, leaving the rest of us to buckle under the weight of the incalculable, and plunge on ahead, dispatching clusters of same-coloured
blocks without a thought for the resulting reshuffle.
Unfortunately (or thankfully, depending on your outlook)
Rock 'n' Blocks lets you get away with a button-mashing approach. Although things become leaner as you approach level 60 and the last few levels of the game, even on Legend mode it's possible to get all the way through without ever thinking more than a move ahead.
To make things even easier, there's a range of powerups to deploy. The first of these that you'll encounter, and the most prevalent throughout, is the solo, an energy bar that charges as you dispatch the
blocks. Once you fill it, you can trigger an explosion of electricity that dispatches all clusters of three or more in a flash, then lingers in a crackling charge and clears any other clusters that emerge from the rubble.
Other powerups include a laser beam that slices a row or column of
blocks from the screen, a rainbow-coloured button that re-arranges all of the
blocks into same-coloured strata, a brick that destroys every other brick of the same colour, and a bomb that guts a swathe of the screen when you detonate it.
While these powerups are all sufficiently different from each other and well-conceived, the sheer profusion of them blunts
Rock 'n' Blocks's teeth.
Here, as with the general difficulty of the levels, Gameloft have taken a softly softly approach to difficulty – even going so far as to offer you the option of fewer colours whenever you fail a level – and while this hand-holding will appeal to many,
Rock 'n' Blocks' charms may well be lost on more experienced puzzle gamers.
Still,
Rock 'n' Blocks' vivacity pretty much drowns out these niggling doubts. The variety of the levels, for a start, is a big plus. After cruising through the first level you're treated to a variant that appears identical until, after 30 seconds or so, all of the
blocks pour up onto one of the walls or the ceiling, leaving you to carry on from a new perspective.
In some levels, the aim is simply to last two minutes, while in others you have to reach a certain score. In some, the
blocks come from the top and the bottom of the screen, closing in on each other like the Death Star's trash compactor; in others, the screen is entirely filled, and you have to slide whole rows or columns around to make clearable clusters.
There are five prizes available at each of the cities you visit, and the pursuit of a full trophy cabinet gives you some incentive to keep playing once you've rattled through the game once, which goes some way to compensating for the lack of challenge, though not nearly enough to excuse it completely.
Aesthetically, the rock garb in which
Rock 'n' Blocks is so glamorously clad injects it with plenty of energy. However irrelevant they are to the action, the swarthy rockers who appear between the missions to goad and gloat genuinely motivate you to win, and musical samples from big names like Bloc Party demonstrate that Gameloft has taken pains to produce a solid, fun game.
Rock 'n' Blocks may die young, but it certainly lives fast.
