Ponk Review

As video game trends go, "bullet time" is among the best.

There was a time when every action game worth its salt (and plenty that weren’t) allowed you to stop or slow time while you went about your death-dealing business at a normal pace.

Someone’s probably applied the system to a match-three puzzler before, but if so I can’t remember it. Even if they have, I doubt they granted you quite as much power as Ponk does.

Once you’ve built up your pause bar through - surprise, surprise - matching clusters of three or more coloured blocks, you're granted the ability to pause time. When this happens, you can literally rearrange the playing field.

To clarify, that doesn’t just mean you can manoeuvre the blocks that are dropping from the sky – you can swap around the blocks that have already settled, too. The possibility for engineering screen-clearing combos is immense and pleasantly empowering.

As is your ability to position the falling blocks any way you want in real time. Unlike other match-three puzzlers, the blocks in Ponk rain down as multiple single units. You can get a hold of each with your finger and drag them where you want them.

It’s the most quietly innovative match-three mechanic I’ve seen since Piyo Blocks 2 and its simultaneous matches, and it allows for a similar degree of frenzied combos. It’s not quite as good, however.

While easy to use, dragging blocks around just isn’t as satisfying as you’d hope. It somehow feels like you’re being spoon-fed, waiting for the right colour to drop in order to extend a combo. Conversely, it’s a lot more annoying when the right colour doesn’t appear, even though you can order more colours via a handy button on the left hand side of the screen.

Still, with two pleasingly different modes – Klassic and Kaboum (as well as a fairly typical Time Attack mode) - Ponk is a worthwhile purchase for match-three puzzler fans looking for something a little more interesting than another Bejeweled clone.