Thursday, June 3, 2010

Review: Sigma

Match 3 games are like doodle games and TD games in the AppStore. God! There are so freaking many I already feel sick just by seeing another one of those. Really, is like someone had told a bunch of people "do this, exactly this, do not try to innovate, improve or anything in any way, ppl will love it" and people actually believed this. Thank BigStack Studios for not listening to this...

What can I say about Sigma? It is as simple and as complex as you want it to be, it is a match 3, made different. In this game you have 2 cylinders in each side of the screen, which you can roll with your fingers, a click will send a piece from one side of the other. The objective? Match 3 or more of the same color and start making points. But the game doesn't stop there. Matching 5 or more gives you power-ups, those, when "matched" with any color, have different effects, there's destroy row, destroy row and column, all of the same color, until the biggest and most powerful one, the nuke, which totally clears the screen.

So far so good? Ok I've told you that this game is a match 3 that you play different but that does the same, but believe me, that " playing different" is enough to make it worthwhile. Not convinced? Ok, let me elaborate on the complexity of the game. As you can imagine from the different gameplay, this game is harder than most M3s, since you can only use the top block on your columns. But to add to that, there are also... chains. But they're not your usual chains, to begin one, just make a match, from that point on you'll have a colored timer in the bottom of the screen, and that determines the time you have left to make another match of the same color to get a multiplier going. Make a match of any other color, and the multiplier, chain, combo or however you wanna call it, is gone. That means that potentially high scores will be only for those with enough dedication and fast fingers to pull it off.

But worry not. The game is also designed for the casual not color matching crazy player, you could go by matching colors as you see them, as big as you can, and survive with the aforementioned power-ups. The game also comes with 3 difficulties, casual, normal and hardcore, each with several sectors and each sector with 5 levels. To go through a level you simply need to fill a bar at the top (fills with the points you make) before the time runs out. Yep, it is timed, so I'd really suggest you to start with casual, because this game is different enough that will take a bit to get used to it (even the dev admitted to still lose several times on hard mode).

Bottom line, this game is great,it has a LOT going for it, visuals, music, gameplay and addcitivity (yes, I just made that up). This is what ever M3 game wishes to be and will never become, so if you're ever to give a chance to any M3 game, give it to this one, and you will not regret it.

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