Taro Omiya

I have fond memories of Collapse!, by Gamehouse, back in high school. It was a simple and fun game during the rise of flash games. Playing Collapse! Blast on Google+ brings back many of those memories, but I find it difficult to find the original charm the old game had.

The directions to play Collapse! Blast is as simple as a single picture: click on any combination of 3 adjacently-placed, like-colored blocks to make them disappear. While this gameplay is similar to Diamond Dash, Collapse! Blast differs in a few ways. First, the blocks do not take up the entire screen. Instead, they rise from the bottom, imposing a new peril: letting the blocks rise to the top of the screen is instant game-over (don’t worry, this doesn’t happen often). Second, destroying an entire column of blocks causes the blocks on the outer edges to converge inwards. Third, Collapse! Blast adds a risky but rewarding strategy, where one can deliberately raise more blocks to gain more points. This last part makes the game significantly more entertaining than Diamond Dash, where no similar risks exist.

Interestingly, Collapse! Blast also tweaks its “physics” every week, changing how quickly you get score multipliers, Frenzy Mode, etc. Also, as you play more, you gain more Experience Points to earn power-ups, such as Bombs and Thunderbolts. This helps even the odd, but they come in very slowly. You’re probably bored by the point you get the last Colored-Bomb, even though the next item helps give you massive points. It’s quite unfortunate this terrible progression provides little curiosity or gratification.

Perhaps the worst offender, however, is its Life system. Much like Diamond Dash, Collapse! Blast offers only a palpable 3 lives to play through each game in succession. While the game will initially award you with extra levels to keep you playing, you’ll quickly hit a point where the game simply prevents you from playing further. One regains a life after 5 long minutes, or after asking a friend for help. While it’s true that by gaining more experience points, you’ll eventually increase your life meter up to 5 containers, that only means you can play 5 or 6 games successively before getting annoyed by the “wait 5 minutes” pop-up dialog. By then, you might as well stop playing.

Collapse! Blast is a legitimately fun game that I want to enjoy, but doesn’t let me. The core game mechanics is, by all means, very fun and frantic. There’s a big satisfaction for setting up large groups of blocks for elimination. Yet, this is hindered by one of the worst energy system ever created on a Google+ game. In a rare bit, I find this single flaw so glaringly bad, I cannot get myself to play the game longer.
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Triple Town is a puzzle game developed by Spryfox. Due to its beta state, features such as the menu are missing. That said, just by the gameplay alone, Triple Town is one of my favorite Google+ games due to its complexity hidden under its simple rules.

The premise behind Triple Town is simple: connect 3 like-elements to combine them into a bigger reward. Each upgraded element has a higher point value, increasing your aggregate score. Once the entire 6 x 6 board is filled, the game tallies up each element’s points, and rewards you with coins respective to your score.

Despite this simple goal, the tutorial is actually quite long. After merging 3 grasses into a bush, and 3 bushes into a tree, the tutorial introduces several elements to help your score: an Imperial Bot, which removes an element from the board; a crystal, which works as a wildcard for merging two like elements; a storehouse to retain a single element for you; and finally the store which contains elements you can buy for upgrades. Impeding your goal, however, are moving bears and teleporting ninja bears that both take up a space. Defeating them requires trapping them, or by using an Imperial Bot to turn them into gravestones. Sadly, the game introduces these elements all at once, making it hard to keep track of which element does what. In addition, the game merely leads you to the next move, and its attempt to explain what the move does is rather lacking.

Still, I really enjoy playing Triple Town. The game has a simple but rewarding risk system: the element you place on the board are random, though it’s typically a grass. With the inclusion of the storehouse, you frequently end up gambling if the next move is a bush or not to combine them better. While the store sells a bunch of bushes and tree for easy upgrade, the price is hefty, and its a bit unrewarding. Dealing with bears also requires a good amount of strategy, as they will always appear to annoyingly take up a space. Walling them into a corner works wonders, but holds the risk of being unable to combine elements for a long while. Playing the game longer helps you develop better strategies to deal with different scenarios, and it’s always fun to know what the next element upgrade will be after a merge.

Like most games, Triple Town has an annoying energy system. The number of moves are limited to a ceiling of 100 moves (unless you buy 200 moves from the store), and they regenerate at a slow pace of 5 minutes. Despite this, though, the game does store your last session, so you can play it later without the risk of, say, your tomatoes rotting in the farm. In addition, the price for 200 moves are, while hefty, attainable after 2 playthroughs, so it’s not as annoying as it seems.

While strictly one player, and not very social, Triple Town more than makes up for its shortcomings by providing complex strategies for better scores in an otherwise simple game. With the store to even the odds, no time-based tasks, and a generous amount of coins given after the end of each session, the game rarely feels annoying. This, plus the extremely addicting gamble system of predicting your next move greatly helps the gameplay.
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