Quick Look: GumDrops for iPhone
While I’ve been all over the place on how I feel about his games, I admire Shen Mansell as a developer. He’s always put his all into developing his games, each one has clearly improved upon the last in terms of polish, and whether or not his games are a commercial success he keeps making more because he loves what he does. GumDrops is his 3rd outing on the iPhone, and it’s definitely a step above the first two in terms of overall shine. I could actually really get into this game if it weren’t for one small game play feature…
GumDrops reminds me somewhat of Dr. Mario. Your playing field is a series of rows filled with different colored GumDrops, and pairs of GumDrops fall from the sky. Your task is to move and rotate the pairs to align with GumDrops in the playing field in such a way that you form groups of X or more GumDrops, where X is the minimum line length as specified on the left side of the screen. For all of the game modes this starts at four, and it increases more rapidly depending on which game mode you’re playing. When you meet the required minimum “line” length for a particular color that line will go away to make room for more pieces. The nice thing is that it doesn’t really have to be a line. You just have to have enough pieces of a certain color touching to clear them from the board.
There are four game play modes to GumDrops. Long Play has no set achievements. You simply keep playing until uncleared gumdrops have reached the top of the screen. Your maximum line length will increase from time to time, and so will the speed with which the gumdrops fall from the top of the screen. The Trial is a rather interesting mode because the minimum line length increases every time you clear a group of gumdrops. Twisty Twenty and Fast Twenty both require you to match 20 groups, but Fast Twenty sees the gumdrops moving at a much more accelerated rate.
Clear Some Gumdrops
There are on screen controls for rotating the gumdrops and moving them left or right. To speed up their decent you click somewhere in the bottom third of the screen. The controls seem pretty responsive and haven’t really caused me any troubles. There is one game play element I don’t really like, however, and that’s the fact that when you clear a group of gumdrops, any gumdrops of different colors that were touching and are now not supported by anything just stay where they are at instead of falling until they land on top of something. I suppose this is a “nice” change of pace from similiarly themed games, but I really prefer having extraneous items fall like I’ve come to expect them to, and find this mechanic rather distracting in terms of overall game play.
The visuals are pretty simple, but they grow on you after a while. The gumdrops all have faces that are pretty expressive, and it’s neat how the gumdrops sort of meld to each other when they are next to ones of like color. The sound effects are fine, though the bomb exploding sounds like someone simply spitting into a microphone. I like the song choice, but it doesn’t really fit with the game. I just think it’s a good rendition of the particular song the developer chose. However, you can turn it off and play your own music.
Each new game that Shen Mansell brings us shows a marked improvement in quality and polish, and GumDrops is no exception. The game is solid, the different modes of play are nice (and Trial mode is quite challenging), and OpenFeint integration means you can compete with your friends. The only thing holding me back from being ecstatic about GumDrops is the whole “floating gumdrops” idea. Otherwise I think GumDrops is a job well done.
Final Verdict: Recommended
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Tags: Eric Pankoke, GumDrops, iPhone, Quick Look, review, shen mansell, technobrains
