Astropop Review

Rainy day

On the early levels the rate of descent of each row is quite forgivingly slow, meaning you'll have plenty of time to consider where to place each block, but after about the fourth level (of classic mode) it starts to get a bit hectic. With the threat of an impending Game Over, the race is on to grab as many of each colour as you can and place them back as quickly as possible. In doing so you'll cause explosions, chain reactions and combos to clear as much of the grid as possible before they reach your level.

Vector's weapons are better than Sprocket's any day.

To ramp up the challenge, the game starts to increase the number of different coloured blocks, as well as stone blocks that you can't pick up, and placing all manner of destructive blocks in among the regular ones. For example, some will help you take out an entire column or row, while others help give regular blocks an explosive enhancement or simply give you a points bonus.

As you progress, your chosen character's weapon charges up, giving you the ability to destroy a large portion of what's above you - and in turn the chance to recover a dire situation just in time. Every fourth round cleared unlocks new capabilities for your weapons, which helps to balance out the increase in the speed of descent and the much more complex array of blocks that inevitably follows each new level. In addition, you'll encounter a bonus level to clear within a time limit. On these occasions, you've got to remove all the blocks on an already-full screen, with nothing re-appearing to take their place. As much fun as these are, they give a hint of the possible omission of a puzzle mode - a strange decision given the small amount of content on offer already.

Chain gang

Level 21? Not in this lifetime.

With each level (bonus or otherwise) over with in a flash, you'll soon find yourself having to cope with a series of increasingly frantic scenarios where luck seems to play an equal part with skill. Sometimes, a special block will appear just at the right time, setting off an improbable chain reaction that you really couldn't have seen coming. When you scrape by these levels by the skin of your teeth, Astropop gets quite exciting, but it's also quite a bind being robbed of a decent score because of the game's somewhat random nature.

To compensate, the game 'checkpoints' on the completion of every fourth level, allowing you to start over without having to play the too-simple early rounds. This is fine to a degree, but given that so many of the game's achievements are centred on your score, there's less of an incentive to make the process of clocking up a high score even harder for yourself. It's likely you'll find yourself pretty overwhelmed by the pace of the latter levels and not really want to run through the whole thing from the very start, but also mindful of the fact that starting the game from a later level isn't going to gain you the score you need to show off to your mates. Humph.

A far better idea - if you're into quick-fire high-scoring feats - is to cane the game's intense and condensed Survival Mode. Because the game kicks off at a much higher difficulty level from the word go, it's unlikely that you'll last all that long. To give you an idea, one of the main achievements is to survive five minutes (and another one at nine minutes). We managed about six, and that felt like a good effort, under the circumstances.

Killing spree!

Drag and pop.

With so many power-up blocks thrown at you from the off, you'll find yourself pulling off Giga and Maximum combos with abandon (which the female voiceover seems delighted to announce, Unreal Tournament-style, with unwavering enthusiasm). The only issue is that half the time you'll not really know why so many fireworks are going off all over the screen. At first there's a real feeling of strategy to it, but once it gets going you're playing on instinct, luck, and no small amount of skill. If you can convince a few mates to get involved (Geometry Wars-style), there's a good chance the competition will drive you on to get stupidly good at it, but without that extra spur, the game's initial appeal can wear off pretty fast.