videogamer.today.com

Riding the train to work this morning I ended up with a stiff neck after hunching over the Nintendo DS and Super Collapse 3 for the entire one-hour ride.

An addictive puzzler with a simple premise and quickly escalating level of challenge, Mumbo Jumbo’s Super Collapse 3 succeeds in the same way as many other great puzzle games. It distills videogaming to its simplest form. Strategy, timing and reflexes combine in a simple block-busting format that only asks you to tap, tap, tap on the handheld’s touch-screen.

There are a few different game modes, but the classic mode conveys the basic idea. Colored blocks move in row by row at the bottom of the screen. Whereever three of the same color are touching, you can remove them by tapping them with the stylus. Gravity pulls the rest of the blocks into the gap and play continues.

 
The single player quest places the color-blasting challenges across a colorful world map.

A fun single-player mode strings together progressively more difficult boards where you must survive a preset number of rows by clearing away enough blocks to keep the screen from filling up. Additional modes are introduced that incorporate bomb blocks and other power-ups, levels where the screen fills in from the top and bottom at the same time, and one eye-crossing mode where the rows slide constantly to the left or right. There’s also a puzzle-stage mode where you must clear the screen of every block, usually with just a few taps of the stylus.

The difficulty ramps up quickly for the classic levels, while the other modes string the player along at a more even pace.

The result is a bit uneven, but it’s a fun, addictive game and after spending nearly an hour happily retrying the same challenging level, I can officially recommend it for DS owners. Better yet, it’s been out a while so it’s one you might be able to pick it up cheap.

Scroll down and leave a response to this post.
For more from this writer, bookmark http://videogamer.today.com.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS