Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix
PlayStation 3
Nostalgia Factor:
I first heard of the original Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo back in the mid-90’s. Back then, I had absolutely zero interest in the game. I had Tetris as a kid and I would play it from time to time, but other than that, puzzle games really weren’t my thing.
Now that I am older and wiser, I do enjoy a good puzzle game from time to time. Dr. Mario and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine are two personal favorites of mine. When I saw the upgraded version of Puzzle Fighter II on the Playstation Now, I decided to give it a go. With just one day left on my free seven day trial, I didn’t want to dive into anything that would take me too long to complete. Just something I could play for a little bit, check off my list as “played”, and then move on.
And that’s exactly what I got with this game.
Story:
It’s a puzzle game. There isn’t much story to be found here. You pick a character and face off against all of the other characters until you’ve beaten them all. That’s it. To give the game credit, it does make an attempt to keep things interesting in the later stages of the game. There are a few humorous dialogue boxes that pop up when you are battling the game’s bosses. I still wouldn’t say the game has a real storyline, but at least they try to keep things fun and interesting.
Gameplay:
I mentioned earlier that I really enjoyed Dr. Mario and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. If you are familiar with either of those games, you’ll quickly figure out how to play Puzzle Fighter. It isn’t identical to those other games, but it plays out similarly enough.
Rather than just simply lining up same-colored gems to make them evaporate, there is an added step here. Gems can only be destroyed by “crash gems” of the same color. So if you’ve got a big stack of red gems you want to obliterate, you have to wait to get a red crash gem and then drop it onto these red gems.
If you put a yellow crash gem onto a stack of red gems, nothing will happen. So this adds an extra layer of strategy to the game. You have to build structures that are layered in color and crash gems, so that when you destroy part of the structure with a crash gem, the rest of it collapses and comes into contact with same colored crash gems below it. And then that part collapses and falls into more crash gems. You want to create big falling gem combinations. The bigger the combination and the more gems you can destroy in one turn, the better.
Big combos cause useless un-removable blocks to fall onto your opponents screen. They could be building up some big combination, but if you beat them to the punch, their screen will get buried in useless gems that do nothing but block their moves and get in their way. Unlike other puzzle games, these blocks can’t be removed by the player. They all come attached with a timer that counts down from five. If you can survive for five turns, the blocks vanish and go away.
If you want to get good at this game, you have to learn how to consistently create combos and drop these gems onto your opponent. You also have to learn to cope when these gems are dropped on you, because it is going to happen. A lot.
Outside of the main game, Puzzle Fighter II offers a few other game variations to keep things fresh. Nothing too crazy though. One is the traditional “line up the colors” mode like you see in Mean Bean Machine, where you don’t need a crash gem to initiate big combos. There are a few other game modes that I can’t remember anymore. I played through several of them before I got bored with the game and decided to turn it off.
Graphics:
The game has a very distinctive bright and cartoony feel to it. I like how all the classic Street Fighter characters are smushed down so that they look like kids. Their animations are very humorous and charming as well. A lot of the lights and effects look pretty cool when you are smashing gems. It is a neat looking game, but at the same time it IS a puzzle game. There isn’t a whole lot to get excited about here. It looks good, but that’s really all I can say about it.
Sound:
I am sure the game’s music and sound effects are fine, but I can’t remember them. I should have written this review immediately while the game was still fresh in my head, rather than waiting a week or two to do it!
I don’t remember the music being bad, but I can’t remember it being good either. One thing I will remember is my wife yelling from the other room as I played: “can you turn that down? It sounds really annoying.” I think there are a lot of yips, yaps, and high pitched anime-style groans from the characters. They are supposed to be fighting in the middle of the screen as you puzzle it out, after all. I can see why that would be annoying, and I am sure the gems make blip noises when you move them or flip them on your screen too.
Again, I don’t remember a whole lot about the game’s sound, but if it was irritating enough to annoy my wife, who never says anything while I am playing video games, then it must not be that great.
Overall:
I truly wanted to like this game, but there was just something “off” about my whole experience as I played it. It is a very shallow game, and there is not a whole lot of content to it. I raced through the single player mode while only dying and having to continue once. I played a few of the extra modes, and the same thing happened. I raced right through 'em.
Before I knew it, not even an hour had passed and I had seen everything there was to see from this game. True, I could have turned the difficulty up. But that wasn’t going to make the game any more enjoyable for me. Maybe if I’d actually paid money for the game, I’d be looking to extend its life a little bit. But on the last day of a free trial? Meh. I was done with it. It's weird, I didn't hate the game, but at the same time the whole thing left me feeling very empty and dissatisfied.
I guess part of the problem is that I didn’t have a human player to play against. That is one of the reasons I liked Dr Mario and Mean Bean Machine so much. I had friends that I could square off against, friends who were REALLY GOOD at those games. We could play for hours on end and it would never get tiring. The matches were intense, the arguments it caused were real. It was a fun time! I didn’t have that with Puzzle Fighter. Not that it is necessarily the game’s fault that I didn’t have anyone to play with, but it did affect my overall enjoyment of the game.
This game was... fine. Whether it is this game's fault or not, I simply didn't like it the way I did Dr Mario and Mean Bean Machine. It is a well made game, but it seems to be missing that extra wow factor that made those other games so special to me. I just don't ever see myself coming back to it again, which is my justification for giving it such a low score.
Final Score:
D+
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