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Balloon Blocks review

Balloon Blocks is a physics based arcade puzzle game which looks like Tetris but is in fact a Match 3 like game with coloured soft jelly blocks.

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The jelly blocks fall down the screen at a fairly fast rate and when making contact with another object or surface they will start to bounce. It can be very tricky to get the blocks where you want them to be. Once the blocks have landed they start to freeze and remain static. A Unfreeze bar is gradually filled up which once activated will unfreeze all the blocks back into their jelly state and that is where the fun begins. If you have a full game area of blocks you will get a chain reaction as three or more blocks of the same colour make contact with each other. The result is quite impressive and you will usually be left with few remaining blocks in the play area and a massive score to reward you.

The game has two main modes, Quickplay throws you instantly into a game and Single Player allows you to choose from four game modes. Normal is basically the same as Quickplay, Clear mode is where you must remove the existing blocks from the play area, in Survival mode you must keep playing for as long as possible. Custom Mode allows you to create your own game with a good variety of options to configure including the block designs. The number of game modes are good, especially the custom mode which allows for a lot of replayability.

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So far so good but there are issues with the game which are unfortunately game breaking. During writing the review I left the game unpaused while I was writing some notes and noticed that despite the game area being full of blocks which were above the ‘jar’ the game had not ended. Blocks were falling off the sides of the screen which should result in a game over but instead the game continued. After a while the Unfreeze automatically started which cleared the majority of the game area so I continued playing and found it was now impossible to lose the game as the blocks falling out the screen would not end the game. I repeated this several times with success every time, the boundary detection is unfortunately very broken.

The second major issue is that the game is very easy even on the hardest difficulty. In the majority of cases you can let the game area fill up with blocks and at the last moment use the Unfreeze which will start the chain reaction. Each chain replenishes the unfreeze bar and nine times out of ten the bar will be full straight afterwards, repeat the process ad infinitum. I sat through 30 minutes of this to confirm it was not a fluke.

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The game is presented well with easy to navigate menus and graphically it looks good with colourful blocks and nice chain reaction graphics. There are some occasional slowdowns but not enough to put you off playing. There are a few music tracks to listen to but they do get repetitive fairly fast.

Balloon Blocks would be a good game but there are unfortunately some game breaking issues that do need to be fixed. The difficulty does need to be addressed as it is far too easy to play even on the hardest difficulty. With these changes it would really improve the game and something that I would be happy to recommend, in the current state I would suggest checking out the trial and see if you can live with the issues either permanently or if/when the developer fixes them.

Balloon Blocks costs 240 :MSPoints: and more information can be found here.

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