Mini Review – Bejeweled Blitz

Match-Three Puzzler

Give my friend 8 to 3 all the way.

Rich

Some jewels in a game.

So this sequel has wisely tried to break everything down into handy bite-sized pieces by limiting each game to one minute. Far from being a step in the right direction, PopCap have rather gone in the right direction and then overshot their destination by a few thousand miles as one minute really isn’t enough time to get into the zone before the whole thing is over but still, it does make everything feel pretty accessible and casual and despite each game having the average lifespan of a mayfly in Chernobyl, you can still lose hours to what is a highly addictive title.

The game also allows you to play the ‘Classic’ and ‘Twist’ (where you rotate squares of four jewels to align them) versions of Bejeweled, both of which are easy to get into (despite the slightly ham-fisted non-customisable controls – ‘Classic’ would obviously benefit from using the right-stick to make swaps) which effectively gives you double the value over the original title.

Add to that some decent leaderboard integration and decent presentation and you’d think this would be a winner.

Unfortunately, Bejeweled Blitz lets itself down in both modes thanks to the effect that luck plays on each game. If things drop in your favour you can easily score two or three hundred thousand. Have things go against you and you’ll be scoring a tenth of that without really doing anything different. Sure, it still takes skill and judgement to capitalise on these opportunities but ultimately luck will be the biggest factor.

With the far-superior Chime available for half the price, your Microsoft points would be far better spent on that but if you don’t mind the idea of being horribly addicted to an ultimately random and pointless variant, Bejeweled Blitz will do at a push.

4/10