Thoughts by Elwood (11 00 2008) – PC (Windows)
Okay… first off, this game is in Swedish… or Norwegian – you can switch between these languages… and it’s completely irrelevant. This game is a Coloris/Columns clone – and a very good one! Concept is simple – get 3 gems in a row, vertical, horizontal, diagonal – and they vanish. The original was usually referred to as a “Tetris-like game” although that kind of reduces the concept to less than it is. Coloris (or Columns …or Gemline) requires a different set of tactics and strategy. You cannot make long term plans as you can (try to) do in Tetris, you have to build and let vanish fast – you can prepare a larger collapse, but the game doesn’t let you this room, you’ll run out of space faster than in Tetris. Some might argue it’s not as challenging as Tetris – maybe it’s not, but it requires a different kind of thinking, not necessarily easier or harder…
In the big pool of think-fast-games this concept – along with the original Tetris concept – belongs to my favorites. I do notice though that I let the game take control over my skills of planning ahead. While I do know there’s plenty of time (at least in the lower levels) to look at the next tile and plan where it can be placed, I usually simply couldn’t do that as I found it hard to imagine the lines after the vanishing took place. Might just be me, but that made up for a good challenge.
This is one of the best clones I’ve come across so far – it’s been made as some kind of advertisement from this Scandinavian firm called Jobline – no idea about them really, they’ll show some kind of advertisement between the levels (I think – could be anything… don’t speak these languages – one of the screenshots shows one of these, maybe we’ll get a translation one day…?) – apart from that it’s just a good remake of the classic. Also liked the music although it can get annoying after a while – but you can turn it off (shouldn’t be hard to find even without knowledge of the language), so well, no problem at all.
