 |
| | Gameplay
Sound
| | Graphics
Value
 |
| |
| | Genre: Puzzle & Trivia | | Min OS X: 10.4  CPU: Intel @ 1600 MHz RAM: 512 MB |
| |
|
Peggle is a pretty rare breed of casual game. It’s a game that is casual down to its core. The game can be played by closing your eyes, moving the mouse and hitting a button, and that method might end up being perfectly successful. However, surround that simple gameplay core is just a beautifully arranged package. The graphics, the design, the music, the extras. It all comes together in Peggle—and Peggle Nights just refines the formula even further.Peggle is essentially pachinko, or for those of you that know The Price is Right, it’s like Plinko. You fire a ball from the top of the screen and it bounces down among an arrangement of pegs, each peg your ball connects with gets lit up and earns you points. Struck pegs disappear at the end of each turn. The goal in each level is to hit all of the available orange pegs before you run out of balls to fire at them. The gameplay is made more interesting with a wide variety of bonus points for making various types of shots (hitting a distant peg, bank shots, landing a ball in the moving well at the bottom of the screen, and bunches more), inventive and tricky level layouts, and powers bestowed by the various Peggle masters that host each section of the game. By striking the two green pegs on each level, gamers activate the power of the Peggle masters. Those powers range from the ability to fine-tune shots with an extra-long guide, to shooting fireballs, to activating pinball-like paddles, to balls that cause explosions that mark all surrounding pegs. There are 10 Peggle masters in all… with an eleventh unveiled in Peggle Nights. I won’t reveal them all here, because a lot of the fun of playing the game is seeing just what ability will be unlocked next. That sums up Peggle on the whole, but what of Peggle Nights? Chances are if you know the game, you’re here to find out if you should drop more of your precious cash on the sequel. Well, Peggle Nights doesn’t bring much change overall to the Peggle gameplay world. The core gameplay for both is exactly the same, short of the inclusion of the eleventh master and her new power. But what Nights does bring to the table is a lot of peripheral all-around improvements. The core of the game doesn’t really need any adjustment. It ain’t broke. So what PopCap did instead was make everything that surrounded it better.
|
|
