Collapse! Chaos

Let's face it: match-three puzzlers have become a little stale on mobile. Not just because there's a helluva lot of them, but also because the genre was originally designed for players using a mouse, not a mobile keypad. Moving a cursor round the screen to swap gems, balls or cubes can't help but feel a little clunky, even in the best examples.

That's why iPhone (and touchscreen phones in general) have reinvigorated the genre. Tapping and swiping is perhaps the most tactile, intuitive way of playing these games--arguably better than using a mouse. A touchscreen can't make an unoriginal puzzler special, but it can make the best ones even more addictive.

And so to Collapse! Chaos, the latest version of RealArcade's popular puzzler--originally released as a web/PC game, and more recently spotted on mobile phones as Super Collapse. The game benefits hugely from the touch interface, yet also has the extra features and addictiveness factor that distinguishes the best games in the genre.

Your goal is to clear the screen of coloured blocks, which appear in lines from the bottom of the screen, by tapping on groups of three or more of the same colour. They disappear, leaving those above to fall down, forming new groups. Additionally, you can tap at the bottom of the screen to make the next row appear quicker.

In Classic mode, the game really is as simple as that, with you having to survive a set number of rows to progress to the next level. If your blocks reach the top of the screen, it's game over. It works superbly. You soon get into the tap-tap-tap rhythm, with the simple clicky sound effects adding to the atmosphere. The gameplay pulls you in – it's truly addictive.

But there's a bunch of other modes, too. Strategy mode links the new rows to the blocks you make disappear. The faster you tap, the quicker new ones appear. Puzzle mode gets you to clear a finite number of blocks from the screen, arranged in a pattern. Panic Attack, meanwhile, has rows dropping from the top of the screen too, to provide more of a challenge.

There's also Quest mode, which sees you traveling through four lands completing challenges taken from all four modes to earn stars. Besides offering a sense of progression, there are also new gameplay elements in the form of power-ups.

You can buy bombs to remove all blocks of a certain colour from the screen, as well as others to explode whole rows and/or columns, shuffle all the blocks on-screen, or delay the next row of blocks from appearing. These items add dimension to the gameplay and are near-essential when the speed ramps up in later levels.

Such a solid core offering is only sweetened by a slew of extras. A trio of mini-games reward you with the aforementioned power-ups. A pair of bonus game modes – Continuous and Countdown – can be unlocked by progressing through Quest mode. And you can win trophies for specific achievements, such as earning set amounts of coins, or breaking a certain amount of blocks in one click.

On pure gameplay terms, Collapse! Chaos is excellent, and the various modes should give it decent repeat playability. Our one niggle is that the blocks are ever so slightly smaller than we'd like. It's not a problem when tapping on big groups of blocks, but every so often the game doesn't register your fat thumb when trying to remove, say, a line of three at the bottom of the screen.

We also wish RealArcade had looked at making the game's high-score table connected, so you could see how your best scores compared to other players, rather than making it just track the best scores on your device. Nonethless, Collapse! Chaos is one of the more addictive puzzlers available for the iPhone, and a worthy addition to anyone's handset.