Review: Booooly! - Changing the Match Three Genre?
by Staff Writer
February 9, 2010
Overview
Booooly! may look like any other other match three game, that is until you play it. In Booooly you start with a set of boolies which are like different colored faces, and you try to remove them all. You could just tap on matches of three, but the game is all about booooly which is a match of at least four.
Your goal is continue getting booooly over and over, making chains of consecutive booooly, and really amping up the points. A new row of boolies is added every few seconds, and if the stack pushes over the top line you lose a life, and you get three per game. The biggest feature is that the boolies fall, and meld and move together based on the weight, and gaps below. Plus there's multiplayer like no other match three.
Features
The game is all about different bonuses with missions included for getting five boooolys in a row, or making a match of eight green boolies. There is also a bottom line and if you have less boolies than that it's a bonus. Longer chains of boolies are worth more, with a progressive multiplier for each additional booly of the chain beyond four. Each level requires collecting a certain number of booly, and each group you tap on adds to your own population of booly. Multiplayer is included over wifi or bluetooth giving each player a different screen. You have a whole different screen, and are trying to keep the boooly from reaching the top line. When you make a match of three it removes the boolies, but when you make a booooly it adds that number of boolies to your opponent.
In the game there is a bomb power-up, and a bad booly that is a power down and gets in the way. OpenFeint is included with four high score tables: highest score, highest level, highest booooly, and highest mission complete. 20 achievements are also included each falling into one of the high score categories.
The Good
Booooly is packed with fun in every aspect of the game. First off it has a great balance of fast paced action, and methodical puzzling. You could just tap away at all the matches of three, but your score will suffer, because it's all about waiting for the matches of at least four, and trying to build a streak of booooly.
The gameplay area is always changing with the physics engine of how the booly fall in place, depending on which ones you remove, and the new additions up top. Each level amps up the speed the new booly fall in, and there are more colors of booly (up to eight) making it tough to find matches. In the game you can always change your strategy to make as big of a streak as booooly as possible, or just last as long as you can tapping all matches of three.
The multiplayer helps it stand apart from other match three games. It's great to play against friends where your actions impact their play area, and vice versa. You get a boooly, and it sends those pieces to your opponent, and in doing so the game becomes really fast paced as you both deal with huge influxes of boooly.
The game is really well designed highlighted by the cute booly, and their varying facial expressions when they match, and when they don't. It's nice to see the mass of booly fall, and combine together filling all the gaps below. There is also a good soundtrack that is the same theme song used in Soosiz.
Booooly has a brilliant save system which picks up right where you left off, which is mandatory as these games take awhile. OpenFeint inclusion is always good, and all of the achievements, and different high score tables give plenty of replayability. OpenFeint is nice, but Booooly has intrinsic addictive repalyability like no other match three I've played.
