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Rating:

• Price: $7.99 (Get It)
• Version: 1.0.0
• Developer: Hudson Soft

Oh, Puzzloop looks just like Zuma from PopCap! That’s what I thought, but it turns out Zuma looks like Puzzloop, circa 1998. Now, a decade later, Puzzloop is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. If a game is still fun a decade later, it is time-tested and proven fun.

In Puzzloop, the object of the game is to “bowl” colored balls towards matching balls that roll around on a rail. If a ball reaches the center, you lose and have to start over. Instructions are provided in-game, and covers how to play the game in great detail. You have a number of powerups at your disposal during the game, such as:

• Bomb - blows up the same colored balls that you hit
• Stop - stops forward movement of the balls for a while
• Slow - slows the movement of the balls
• Twister - bounces balls all over the place
• Bats - flies above the rail and transforms the balls

That’s just a sampling of the kind of powerups to expect in Puzzloop. The game features save state, so if you hit the Home button and come back to it, it resumes where you left off. There are two game modes to choose from; Stage Mode and Endless Mode. In Stage Mode, you go through stages, completing them, and it progresses in difficulty the further along you get. In Endless Mode, you simply keep playing to see how many levels you can go before losing; there are 100 levels in total.

During game play, you can open the menu to choose options or to exit to the main menu. In the options, you can lower or raise the sound volume, and make the ball go slow or fast (default is slow.)

Control is very easy, it’s much like Bubble Bash, where you hold down and aim the line where you want to fire the ball in the center of the screen, and then release your finger to fire it. It’s intuitive and works very well. My only issue arises when you have to avoid some of the objects that try to block your balls, if your finger is in the way, you can’t see them, which adds an unnecessary level of frustration. At the same time, these blocking objects add a nice challenge and change of pace.

Graphically, the game is very polished, colorful, and smoothly animated. The menu, and I’m being subjective here, isn’t really my cup of tea. It’s too busy and doesn’t look right, especially with the musical instruments (horns). It’s a minor niggle, For the most part, you can tell the game was professionally made.

The sound effects are great, there’s nothing to complain about there. The music didn’t really stand out, but depending on your taste in music you may enjoy it. It’s a tribal/Caribbean kind of music. Puzzloop fades out any music you’re playing when loading it up.

Tags: hudson, popcap, Puzzle, puzzloop, zuma