Browser Game Pick: Kyobi (Photon Storm)
Kyobi is a Columns-style stack-em-up with a physics twist. Your job is still to match 3 or more of the same colour, but once the blocks land they are not stuck down - any square can be grabbed and thrown around the playarea. All the surrounding blocks will react when collided with and launch themselves around too.
It all adds up to an incredibly simply, incredibly fun little arcade mode which is very addictive. It is quite noticeable that once the container begins to fill rather high, simply throwing random blocks around will usually result in the majority finding 2 other partners and your workload decreasing rapidly. While this might sound like a cheap way to win, it actually adds to the frantic pace and looks brilliant.
Give Kyobi a try. There's also a postmortem by creator Richard Davey.
Comments
Very generic game, but the feeling is spot-on, which is very important. It just feels great smashing the blocks into each other and hearing them shatter like glass when they "match".
As the gameplay is nearly the same as with so many other match-3 games, Kyobi also can't really motivate me to play for a longer while. But, as it's still done so very well it makes for a great little time-waster :)
Posted by: MisterX | April 3, 2009 3:12 PM
pretty fun until you realize it's much more effective to move block around at random, and then it just never ends
Posted by: Anonymous | April 3, 2009 4:37 PM
I found the 'physics twist' was pretty severely lacking. While gravity and momentum were there, the blocks were kind of sticky, making it difficult to slide them around precisely. I spent most of my time wishing for the boxes to twist and rotate.
Regardless of that, the generic styling of the game -- yet another match three -- made it a little difficult to keep interest. The physics gimmick isn't enough to keep it fresh.
Posted by: Greg | April 4, 2009 4:02 PM