Beneath the bright colours lies a deadly game of angles…
The horror of the current economic crisis has taken a while to burst through my rose tinted vision. Despite banks crumbling down and millions getting kicked out of their jobs, it only occurred to me that things were dire when Popcap started selling their FREE online games on XBLA.
YARS fanatics will know that this isn’t the first time that I’ve raised this issue with Popcap, as stated with my Zuma review some time ago. So I was welcomed with a nice surprise when I found peg destructathon ‘Peggle’ actually made an attempt to distance itself a bit from its cheaper Broadband counter-part.
Well, the overall concept stays the same. For those not familiar with casual gaming and are more at home with gunning down anything that moves on their electronic box of wonders, Peggle forces you to fire a ball at various coloured pegs in an attempt to destroy them all under the guidance of 10 animal tutors that all look like characters in the Pixar ‘Rejects’ folder.
These 10 ‘Masters of Peggle’ give you various different power-ups not available in the free version. All of these range from exceedingly helpful ‘ Blast everything with a fireball’ to ridiculously pathetic ‘Computer will simply do the shot for you’ power-ups.
it seems to have rocked the casual gaming world at its foundations
It doesn’t sound like ground breaking material, yet it seems to have rocked the casual gaming world at its foundations and on first impressions, I could not see any bloody reason why. Then again, I’m not familiar with the casual gaming market, stereotypically associated with electronically oblivious mums and clueless OAPs who believe puzzle games will fight off dementia only to realise they’ve been trying to play it on a mosaic of Maoam wrappers.
…Anyway, back to pegs. Things didn’t start off fantastically where the game started repeatedly stating that it was a challenging test of my skill, when after 5 minutes it clearly showed itself up as a colourful game of chance. There’s no way you can predict where your ball was going to go after its third bounce unless you were a protractor in a past life.
This thought failed to stop me from playing, however, and when I returned to the real world for some much needed coffee I found that 4 hours off my life had been eaten away by my peg destroying antics.
The simple gameplay mechanic soon does grow on you and you’ll find yourself having one or two ‘tense’ moments. It seems ridiculous to say that you’ll actually care about a ball narrowly missing a peg but it happens. It possesses that ‘Just one more go’ persona, and soon it begins to possess you…
The XBLA version also tries to give you a lot more value for money this time around. Once you’ve completed the 55 levels in your ‘Adventure’, you’re given a ton of ‘Master’ challenges set to prove your worth. Despite heavily relying on repetition, the extra missions and clear cut presentation does actually makes it look like you’re getting more for your money and could prise cheap players fingers away from the keyboard and onto an Xbox controller.
It’s hard for me to give Peggle a high score as I always have a niggling feeling in the back of my head that I’m just playing a game of chance. After the first initial addiction, coming back to the game makes it seem like you’ve visited Peggle rehab and it soon becomes full of 5 minute thrills rather than hours of compelling gameplay. It’s good to play if you’re preoccupied with something else like eating a meal, waiting for friends or writing a review, yet doesn’t do enough to fully engage you later on. The average mainstream gamer will probably feel the same way, if not worse about it, and casual gamers have probably downloaded 20 versions of the game already. If, however, you’re a casual gamer who has never heard of Peggle, simply add 1 point to my overall score for every year you have not played a video game. Hopefully then this review won’t come over as incredibly biased…
The Bad: Soon gets repetitive, It’s effectively a drawn out game of luck
