Posted on: December 19, 2010 Posted by: Jesse_Hayges Comments: 0

A month or so ago I was also asked to review Ponk, a puzzle game that has some roots in common with the likes of tetris, Dr. Mario, and bust-a-move. The game is a simple and addictive one. The game has a container into which different colored orbs fall, or if you use the now outdated Halloween theme, they could look like cool emoticon balls. The name of the game is Ponk, but the goal is to match three or more in a column or a row, diagonal doesn’t apply sadly.

Like many games of this type you have different power ups, bombs, and landmines that blow up only a certain line above or below the power up, and a cool new feature that I’ve not seen elsewhere. This extra feature is the freeze option. On the right hand side of the screen there is a gauge that counts up successful matches, once the gauge is full, or even before then, you can freeze all the orbs and rearrange them to your liking. The draw back is that you only have so few precious seconds to do this in, so choose wisely. The game play is simple enough, just drag the orbs where they need to be, and let them go. Fortunately you can kind of control up and down as well so you don’t have to wait, or can save it from throwing a monkey wrench into your plans at the last second.

The graphics for this game are pretty standard bill of faire, eye candy wise, it’s just a nice and pleasant game to help kill time. It seems as though you can only have local score boards, which is sort of dissapointing, but it’s still good enough that they included one at all. Other wise how else would you be able to get your sister to do the dishes for you this week right? The three modes, Klassic, Kaboom, and time attack are also pretty standard, but a very welcome sight considering some games are lame enough not to include more than one rule set. Five AM Studio did their homework and made a solid game worthy of your hard earned money, even if it is only two bucks of it. Also check out Ponk HD for their new iPad version. I’m going to see if I can get a copy of that later and I’ll give you my two cents for that one when I do. Even so, it’s only a dollar more, and if you have an iPad, might as well. I give this game a 7 out of 10, and hope to see more cool things from Five AM Studio soon. They did update this game to have Game Center leader boards.

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