Game Reviews

180 Ultra

Star onStar onStar onStar onStar off
|
| 180 Ultra
Get
180 Ultra
|
| 180 Ultra

180 Ultra is a match-three puzzler and a welcome breath of fresh air. That sounds like it should be an oxymoron, but apparently it isn't.

We know full well that there are far too many gem-matching games out there, but 180 Ultra has had us under its spell all week.

The play area looks more like Bust-a-Move than Bejeweled, with a series of coloured coins gradually moving to the bottom of the screen. If the coins overwhelm you, then it's Game Over.

You prevent this from happening by firing more coins upwards. If three of the same colour are in a line, then they, and any of the same colour touching them, will pop out of existence. So far, so match-three.

Heads or tails?

The twist is that each coin has a colour on the reverse side, which is visible from the top. You can flip any coin at any time, be it the one you're firing or the ones atop the screen.

This seemingly small change transforms the game, and makes a compelling monster of a time sink.

There are four game modes to play with, all with their own OpenFeint highscore tables to compete in. They're pretty similar, but it's nice to have different high score tables to monitor.

Endless mode sees you going until you lose, Score Attack gives you 90 seconds to score as highly as possible, Time Attack asks you to destroy 250 coins as quickly as possible, and Drop Attack gives you 90 seconds to take down as many rows as possible, rather than accruing points.

Flippin' marvellous

The presentation is a little plain, but it's colourful enough and never too cluttered. The sound is also decent, with music that maintains a burbling calm and sound effects that reinforce the natural reward of destroying rows.

With games that are kept naturally short (the increase in speed for good runs sees to that) and trance inducing gameplay that's easy to learn but difficult to master, 180 Ultra does something that's very hard to do in a saturated market: it makes the genre compelling all over again.

If you have the slightest interest in arcade puzzle games, you should put aside any match-three fatigue and give it an hour. Or five.

180 Ultra

Just when you thought the mobile market was out of ways to make matching three objects compelling, 180 Ultra will have you sliding coins like it's 2001 all over again
Score
Alan Martin
Alan Martin
Having left the metropolitan paradise of Derby for the barren wasteland of London, Alan now produces flash games by day and reviews Android ones by night. It's safe to say he's really putting that English Literature degree to good use