FONDLE YOUR ORBS
Sparkle: Unleashed is the third game I’ve played from the Finnish developer 10tons Ltd., after the grating King Oddball and the hidden gem Azkend 2: The World Beneath. In terms of enjoyment, this one lands squarely in between. I’m starting to sense a pattern: 10tons excels at mobile-friendly designs built around either match-3 mechanics or physics-based aiming challenges. Sparkle: Unleashed belongs to the former—a simple action-puzzler that’s easy to learn and compulsively playable, right up until it suddenly isn’t, and instead turns into endurance testing.
This is the third entry in the series, and its mechanics are straightforward. You steer an orb launcher left and right along the bottom of the screen, loaded with a single colored orb. From either side of the screen, chains of colored orbs snake along fixed tracks toward a goal. Your task is to fire your orb into the chain, lining up three or more of the same color to make them disappear. If the leading orb reaches the end of the track and drops into the hole, you lose. Clear the entire chain, and you win.
Build a streak of successful shots and the game rewards you with random power-ups: color swaps, shotgun blasts, time freezes, and other panic buttons. These can be upgraded in between levels, though the system feels largely redundant—you’ll unlock everything before the game is over anyway.
What works well is how the track layouts subtly change the pace. Some levels feel frantic and almost arcade-like, reminiscent of Centipede, while others allow for a more deliberate, tactical approach. At its best, Sparkle: Unleashed is tense and addictive. Like most 10tons games, it thrives on that familiar sensation of almost winning—close enough that another attempt feels inevitable.
The problem is scale. At 107 levels, the game far exceeds its own structural limits. Repetition sets in early, and the sheer length is difficult to justify. Backgrounds and track shapes cycle endlessly, while genuinely new ideas—additional orb colors, chained orbs, colorless boulders—are introduced sparingly and stretched far too thin.
I appreciate Sparkle: Unleashed for its clarity and immediacy, but the late-game gauntlet of punishing, often unfair levels eroded my patience. As the pace accelerates, success becomes increasingly dependent on luck rather than skill. Impossible orb combinations appear both in the launcher and on the track, and no amount of planning can compensate when the randomization turns hostile. Lady Luck, as it turns out, is an unreliable partner.
In the end, I’d call Sparkle: Unleashed an average game—an interlude. It offers mindless, occasionally satisfying thrills, but little that lingers. Don’t go out of your way to acquire it, but if you happen to have access to it (it’s included with PS Plus Extra and Premium, wink wink), it may be worth a short visit.
I came for the leisure, but stayed only out of stubbornness—to reach the end and tick another title off my backlog. My time with it was mostly fine, but it spread too little substance over too much playtime. And I suspect most of us aspire to more than spending hours clearing yet another mostly decent match-3 game while the world keeps turning and the beds keep burning.
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