Koloomn review

Thursday 13 April 2006
There are a lot of things you need to ignore here. That name, for starters - calling your game 'column' isn't clever, no matter how hard you misspell it. You also need to ignore the way the actual play area is less than a third of that lovely wide screen. Ignore the terrible, scary Manga characters staring from at the sides of each match with their huge toothless mouths and wide, sightless eyes. And you must especially ignore their almost-successfully translated, yet terrible and pointless, bios.

And you need to ignore them because the actual game is horribly addictive. It's described as being like Tetris upside down - as if that's exciting to anyone but copyright lawyers, especially on a machine that can easily be turned upside down, which would presumably just make it Tetris.

But never mind that: Koloomn is really more like Puzzle Bobble, in that it follows the age-old idea of joining coloured things together to make them disappear. We could go into how you twiddle the squares in blocks of four, and what constitutes a 'chain,' but it's irrelevant here. More importantly, it's easy to grasp, maddening to fail and almost impossible to turn off without 'one more go.' It's hardly pushing PSP, but it'll push your mind upside down.