DIYgamer

iPhone gaming on the Xbox… Swap! [Review]

About a month ago we brought you Arkedo’s first ever game on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) channel. It was a funny little platformer that featured bright colors and retro platforming action. Anyways, you can read about our review of Jump! later. Today is all about Arkedo’s second XBLIG game: Swap!

I chose the title of my review carefully and I chose it specifically because I largely felt that it was true. Swap! is a unique game for the console audience because it brings such a light-hearted, casual game to the world’s second largest console. Something that you’d normally expect to see on the iPhone. In fact, you could actually take Swap! and put a rendition of it on the iPhone and it would be a damn good game. Of course, that’s not to say that Swap! on the Xbox isn’t a good game, but it does suffer from a sort of “fish out of water” type thing.

Anyways, enough rambling, let’s get to the nitty-gritty of the review:

Gameplay

Swap! is actually a pretty fun game. Most people who are into these sort of connect-4 type of casual games will feel right at home in Swap! It offers the same traditional type of gameplay with some added effects like connecting four lightning blocks and creating a large explosion to get rid of whole rows of blocks for massive points. It’s a game that works very well.

The levels in Swap! are nice and long. Now this could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. Some people do enjoy levels that are just shorter, however, for those who want to sit back for a good 15 minute period and play a continuous puzzle game then Swap! is made for you.

The game comes with a story mode (Castle), and arcade mode, and some challenges. The first two are fairly standard, but the challenges are where it gets pretty interesting. You see, once you complete the story mode you’ll unlock the challenge levels where you’ll be given a task to complete, for example, getting a 7-in-a-row. It’s a nice feature that adds some additional gameplay for when you don’t want to play a normal match.

Swap! controls beautifully. I’ve never actually played a puzzle game that had this slick of controls. Usually it’s a click-based system to get stuff moving. With Swap!, however, it’s a dual-stick puzzler which means you simply highlight one of the blocks with your left stick and you move it in any the four directions with a swift flick of the right stick. It makes the game feel smoother, faster, and much better than other competitors.

For those who find these types of games a bit too easy, Arkedo has gone ahead and added in varying difficulty levels. It’s not really a plus or minus, but I’ve seen games like this that didn’t include the difficulty level so it felt worthy enough for a mention.

Style

Swap! is a beautiful XBLIG game. There’s no doubt about it. Arkedo showed us what they could do with their first game, Jump!, and they have only gone and further proven their prowess in style with Swap! It is, hands down, one of the best looking XBLIG on the market.

Additionally, all of the sounds and effects are adequate. Nothing remarkably worth noting but it didn’t sound awful either.

Story

Swap! does indeed have a storyline. A very, very weird one.  To sum it up in one sentence you have to help King Kat get back to his castle. Beyond that, I can’t really explain the story to well. It’s not bad… just weird. I’ll leave it to you to figure out if that’s a good thing or not.

Everything Else

I really wish Swap! had a multiplayer aspect to it. Not so much to play online, but rather so my girlfriend and I could sit down and play a match together. The game is very fun, one of the best of it’s kind really, but that all gets prematurely pushed aside when you can’t even play with somebody else. This isn’t necessarily a deal breaker, but it would have been a nice feature nonetheless.

Swap! is a great game for people who enjoy casual puzzlers. It has all the makings of a great casual puzzler and it comes at a price that can be easily swallowed (240 points). All in all, I’d say this game worthy of a purchase if your ever in the mood to sit back and enjoy some high definition puzzle gameplay. You could do a lot worse, after all.