986th played so far
Genre: Puzzle
Platform: PC?Internet/Nintendo DS
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: PopCap Games
Publisher: PopCap Games
A decade later, it’s hard not to feel that Bejeweled lost out after Candy Crush Saga created a large list of match three games to fight for everyone’s attention on phones. There have been a lot of variations on the theme too, which the Bejeweled series prefigured as well by today’s Twist entry. Today I get to see how this works out.
Our Thoughts
When you start playing, Bejeweled Twist looks a lot like normal Bejeweled. You get a field of gems and you are meant to group them so they explode and are replaced by others. Destroy more of them or create combos to get higher points and you go on from there. Here, instead of swapping gems to create combos, you twist them in groups of four, a different way of setting up these puzzles. At this point I’ve seen all sorts of variations in different games, but here it does, indeed, feel like a nice twist on the formula.
Your main killer are bombs that appear and need to be removed on time, but beyond some additional special gems the game starts to repeat itself quite quickly. There’s certainly something fun in the repetition of the game and the challenges it sets, escalating the number of gems you need to explode. Without much more going on, though, it fails to really sustain that loop, and with the type of gameplay used in premium games to underpin other games like Puzzle Quest, the game really is just there for when the mood strikes.
Final Thoughts
Bejeweled Twist is a nice way to explore and do something slightly different with the match three genre, but ultimately it’s not the twisting mechanic that Bejeweled needed for its innovation, but adding in more features to make your levels more interesting.