Puyo Pop Fever (DS)

Sonic Team has maintained a laserlike focus on giving its games an intensely cute, cheery look, and Puyo Pop Fever doesn't break this trend. There's a nice unified look to the game, and everything runs smoothly. There are plenty of big, colored particle effects whenever you clear some pieces, and the background gets downright psychedelic when you enter the fever mode. There are some other nice, smaller touches that help bring everything together, such as the various looks the different-colored gumdrops have, which gives each color a sort of unique bit of personality.

Don't let looks fool you. There's a deep, challenging puzzle game to be found in Puyo Pop Fever.

Bright primary colors definitely work to the advantage of a game where the gameplay itself depends on different colors; however, the game's overenthusiastic sound design ends up being screechy and annoying. The music, which could be charitably described as techno for kids, is layered over with the high-pitched voices of the characters, who will chime in whenever anything of importance happens. There's an option to switch to Japanese voices, though it also changes all the menu options over to Japanese as well. In both languages, though, we ran into a terrible sound bug where the character we were playing as would just constantly repeat the same phrase over and over. It didn't happen all the time, but this bug, coupled with the inherently grating sound design, made it easy for us to kill the sound entirely.

For a puzzle game to have real longevity, it needs to be able to marry the two rather disparate concepts of basic, easy-to-learn gameplay and significant strategic depth. Puyo Pop has had this from the beginning, and Puyo Pop Fever maintains this tradition. The new fever gameplay helps pick up the pace, and the single-cart multiplayer options make this an astonishingly great value for multiplayer puzzle fans. If you can tolerate the forcibly cute presentation, you'll find Puyo Pop Fever to be a solid, addictive puzzle game.

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• 4.5 stars

  "I love this game!"

  by limesaber on May 9, 2005

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Amazon.com Marketplace	$29.99	Yes

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Where to buy Puyo Pop Fever (DS)

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• Amazon.com Marketplace $29.99 Yes
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