Reviews

Ooooh yeah! Good ol' Columns! I was genuinely excited when this appeared on Spectrum Computing's random game option, which I'm still not a big fan of as you have to go through books, joysticks and other assorted hardware guff and there doesn't seem to be a way to randomly select just games and that's it, but at least it's something and at least it brought up this. However, as it turns out this version of Columns isn't all that great. It's Columns in gameplay, kinda. The object is the same, it's a Match-3 puzzle game, except it's all time-based, this is where the main problem lies. You know in Columns you keep going to mass a big score until you reach the top? Not here, instead your against the clock and your game ends when the clock runs out, the time does increase as your doing well but it's essentially a varient rather than Columns itself and I don't like it so much. That's arcade mode nailed, in Level Mode it's essentially played like the Tetris arcade except you have to reach a certain score in the allotted time to progress. Again why does time have to play a part in this? Columns was never a time based game or certainly the original game wasn't. I was really disappointed with this because the look is there, the style is there, ok the jewels have become stones but we'l let them off with that as putting in jewels is asking for a lawsuit so fair enough, but the whole element of being a time based game ruins it for me and spoils what could have been a solid version of Columns.