Groovin’ Blocks

It’s amazing how much more bearable things become when accompanied by music.

Whether you work a tedious 9-to-5 with the radio on, partake in the monotony of a daily commute while listening to your iPod, or embark on a torturous car journey with the stereo blaring, music often plays the role of acoustic bubble wrap around your fraying wits.

It has similar mood-altering properties when brought into the video gaming mix. Tie music directly into gameplay and you have yourself a whole new proposition.

One game that did this expertly was Lumines, originally released on PSP and since woefully ported to iPhone and iPod touch. By keying the beats of its electronica soundtrack, it managed to transform an otherwise unassuming match-three puzzler.

In Groovin’ Blocks we have a game that follows many of the same cues, but uses them to form a unique and distinctly more playable experience.

As with Lumines, Groovin’ Blocks is a pretty standard block-matching puzzler in the vein of Tetris or, more specifically, Columns.

Groups of three blocks, vertically stacked and of assorted colours, drop down the screen. It’s up to you to guide them and shuffle them so that they stack up in groups of three or more of any single colour. When this is achieved, the blocks disappear and you get a bunch of points.

Where Groovin’ Blocks differs is in the introduction of a beat bar, which marks the rhythm of the (largely excellent) electronic music pumping in the background. If you bring the blocks down and create matches in time with the music, you gain score multipliers.

The ultimate goal is to win enough points to attain a star rating (one to three) and unlock the next set of tracks that are spread across three levels of difficulty.

It has to be said that Groovin’ Blocks is initially underwhelming. The pace of the game feels oddly out of kilter with the pounding soundtrack, as you only really pick out odd beats to make your moves on. As such, for a rhythm-based game there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of rhythm.

After a while though, you find your brain engaging with the staccato beat and you're prime to be absorbed in hitting your occasional cues like an attentive cymbal player in a big band.

In truth such freestyle rhythm is a blessing, as it allows you to concentrate on the puzzle aspect of the game. It’s a familiar case of thinking ahead in order to set up chain reactions, so you really can’t afford to slip into an audio-induced stupor as you can with some music games.

As the difficulty ramps up, a few control deficiencies are highlighted. Having left, right and down separated by so much screen real estate can lead to annoying inaccuracies in the heat of play.

When things get a little intense, it’s easy to pine for the surety of a physical D-pad as you miss a bonus superbeat (a specific beat that, when hit, doubles your score multiplier for a time) in a mess of fumbling thumbs.

Such control niggles can be worked around, though. And thanks to its absorbing music based play and classy presentation, you're sure to find yourself pulled in by the irregular beats Groovin' Blocks drops.