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Sparkle: Unleashed (2015, Playstation 4) Review


BETTER THAN FONDLING YOUR ORBS


Also for: Android, iPad, iPhone, Macintosh, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 3, Playstation 5, PS Vita, Windows, Xbox One


Sparkle: Unleashed is the third game I've played from the Finnish developer 10tons Ltd., after the annoying King Oddball and the hidden gem Azkend 2: The World Beneath. In terms of enjoyment, this one lands somewhere in between. I'm beginning to sense a trend; their games belong in the mobile-friendly category, and can be divided into match-3 and physics-based aiming challenges. This game belongs to the former; it's a simple match-3 action-puzzler that is easy to learn and hard to put down, until it suddenly is not, and turns into torture before the end.

In this game, which is the third in the series, you steer an "orb launcher" left and right along the bottom of the screen, loaded with an orb of a specific color. From either side of the screen orbs of different colors start snaking down along a set track in waves. You must shoot your loaded orb, squeezing it somewhere into the snake of orbs, to line up three (or more) color-matching ones. This makes them vanish. Your launcher automatically loads new randomized orbs, and you have to keep on firing.


If the first orb of the snake reaches the end of the track, it falls down into a hole and you lose the level. You win as soon as soon as you make the last orb on the track vanish.

If you make matches for three consecutive shots, you get the chance to obtain a random combo power-up that can help you get out of a pickle. It can be color-altering powers, or a shotgun blast, or temporarily freezing the orbs dead in their tracks, just to name a few. It can help tremendously as you start to struggle towards the end of a level. In true RPG-fashion, these power-ups can be upgraded at regular intervals. The choice is yours, although I fail to see the reason why - we get them all before the end anyway.


I like how the track layout for each level alters the style of gameplay. Some  resemble hectic SHMUP:s (like Centipede), and others give you time to plan ahead a little. The game is stressful and addictive, but only up to a point well before the end. In typical 10tons-fashion, whenever you lose a level you feel so close to winning you just have to try again while you're in the zone.

But the game's big flaw is that it consists of too many levels - 107, in fact - which is well beyond the limits of my patience. The game starts repeating itself way too soon, and the absurd length is poorly justified. The cycle of tracks and backgrounds grow tiresome. The game throws new challenges your way, but they're spread thin; new orb colors, colorless boulders and orbs locked behind chains you have to break once or twice before the orb itself can be removed.


I like Sparkle: Unleashed for the simplicity, but the long rush of tough and unfair levels at the end of the game tried my patience. With increasing pace throughout, these levels can really set you up to fail with impossible random combinations of orbs, both in your launcher and on the playing field. You simply cannot clear the track in time unless you get very lucky, and Lady Luck is an unreliable mistress.

I'd call Sparkle: Unleashed an average game; an interlude, a game of mind-numbing, addictive gameplay thrills. Don't go out of your way to acquire it, but if you've somehow obtained it "for free" (it's on PS Plus Extra and Premium, wink wink) it might be worth checking out for a little bit of fun. I came for the leisure, but stayed only for the obsession to reach the end and tick another entry off my backlog. My time with it was mostly decent, but in the end it had too little meat spread over too much bone. I think most of us strive higher in life than playing yet another mostly decent match-3 game for hours, when the world is turning and the beds are burning.

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