Puyo Pop Fever Review

The puzzle genre is thriving on the Nintendo DS. I’m not sure if it’s the stylus, the dual screens or the wireless network play, but puzzles have seriously taken over. There’s Polarium, Snood 2, Bust-A-Move, Meteos, Pokémon Trozei and Tetris. How long has the DS been out? Jeez, I was hoping to at least see a few good platformers before this invasion took place.

Puyo Pop Fever, one of the DS’s first puzzle games, doesn’t really take advantage of the hardware. The second screen essentially goes to waste except in multiplayer battles (to show everybody’s playfield). The graphics aren’t even very impressive and look more like a brighter Game Boy Advance title. But hey, it’s a puzzle game, and Puyo Pop’s lively, anime-like charm is nonetheless presentable and unobtrusive.

What Puyo Pop does wrong in its presentation is its over-the-top audio. The music is standard happiness that only occasionally falls into bearable grounds, and the voice acting is bad. This sounds like the result of several bored teenage girls who drank too much sugary lemonade and passed around a tape recorder. One of the voice clips sounds like the actor started laughing halfway through and blew into the microphone. It’s pathetic, so much so that it’s kind of funny. Like the voicework in the Bomberman games, Puyo Pop’s characters say some of the stupidest things that end up being very memorable.

Onto the bigger aspects of Puyo Pop, I find it easiest to sum up this game as an “organic Tetris”. The falling pieces aren’t stiff, lifeless bricks. They’re colorful, expressive blobs that don’t stay connected when placed on the stack. By that, I mean an overhanging “limb” will break off and fall to fill in gaps. Puyo Pop isn’t about clearing rows, either. The objective is to connect four of the same color to make them disappear. By setting up the playfield just right, you can create chains and combos. Doing so drops “nuisance puyos” on your opponents, gray blobs that can only be eliminated when they touch another color that disappears.

That’s it. There are no power-ups or special tricks and secrets. It’s simple, mindless, and terribly addicting in small quantities. Some skill, or at least a little forethought, is required to set up longer chains, however. It can be very difficult to think like this and anticipate anything more than a 3-hit combo, but figuring it out becomes crucial to beating the AI in story mode (what is this need to always include story modes in puzzle games?).

Unfortunately, the AI has no sense of mercy. They like to tease you, actually. They fill their playfield to the top, making it look like they’re in trouble. Then they drop one more piece, and suddenly they’re enjoying a 10+ combo. I’m not kidding. It is possible to counter some of the nuisance puyos by completing your own chain before the nuisances fall. But a big enough nuisance dump leaves you completely void of any hope to survive. A good enough chain on your opponent’s part can fill your screen with four or five rows of neutral puyos. That by itself is very hard to clear. It takes several turns to wear those away. But before you can get too far into it, another onslaught of nuisance puyos gets dumped on you, pressing you right up against the top of the screen. At this point, there is absolutely nothing you can do. It’s so frustrating. The sad thing is, this happens all the time, whether your opponent is AI or human.

Puyo Pop’s single-player mode is pretty standard. You might periodically have a hankering to take on Endless Mode, but this isn’t the kind of game you buy to play by yourself. What makes Puyo Pop Fever a great investment is its eight-player local play with one cartridge! The download option works really well and loads very quickly. But the unfair dumping problem is ever present. There are settings you can tweak to try and fix this (or at least tone it down), but it’s still an annoying part of the game and will ultimately end your Puyo Pop party in about 30 minutes.

Final Comments

At face value, Puyo Pop Fever is easier to get into than Meteos and any of the other “eccentric” DS puzzle games. With a huge multiplayer capacity, this is a must-have for puzzle fans and friends. But there are so many games of this genre on the DS already, it’s hard for me to fully recommend a game that annoys the heck out of me with its aptly named “nuisance puyos” and grating audio. Unless you just can’t get enough puzzle action (especially when it comes as cheap as this), you’re better off sticking with Meteos, Tetris DS, Bust-A-Move DS and… Okay, that’s enough for now.