|
It doesn't seem to take a lot to make a Tetris-style puzzle game. A few pieces, some simple rules governing how they align, and a well to put them in just about covers it. Toss in a scoring system with some nifty combo mechanics and you've got a winner. Nothing could truly be that easy, of course, and Gunpey shows off perfectly how it's possible to get all the necessary parts for greatness in place and still not quite make it. Not that there's anything wrong with being pretty good.
The basics of Gunpey are simple enough. Four types of tiles are rising from the bottom of the screen, each with a line running vertically across: bottom-left to upper-right diagonally, bottom-right to upper-left diagonally, and two other pieces with a line running across either the top or bottom of the tile. Arrange them so the lines on the pieces make an unbroken chain from one side of the well to another and they disappear. Every few seconds a new line of pieces rises up from the bottom, and when a lined tile is shoved over the top of the well it's game over.
Creating lines is fairly easy, and with a bit of practice ornate structures will converge and divide like lightning across the screen. Pieces can only be moved vertically with the cursor, and most of the tension in Gunpey comes from waiting for a piece to appear in the one empty column on the screen. Though the tiles are rising from the bottom at a steady pace, only a couple of pieces appear at a time in the well's five columns. While this is nice for creating ornate sets of branching lines, it can get a bit nerve-wracking waiting for that last column to give up the necessary piece to unify your creation and clear it from the board. It can also cause a lot of time spent in damage control, as orphan pieces unable to be connected to the current structure wander their way to the top, getting dangerously close to "Game Over" territory. Soon enough, a tile will appear, though, and then it's just a matter of moving it to the right spot and...
Gunpey shows off perfectly how it's possible to get all the necessary parts for greatness in place and still not quite make it. Not that there's anything wrong with being pretty good.
|
...realizing that you accidentally connected it to another set of lines while sliding it up the board and completely trashed your clever plan. D'oh! Fortunately there's time for damage control, as completing any line pauses the grid's inexorable rise to the top for a couple of seconds. This gives time to move a few pieces around and either bolt some more lines on to the departing structure, create a brand new line that will be cleared at the same time as the first one, or just drag some stray tiles down from the top of the screen.
It's all a matter of practice, and learning how the pieces connect shows off more strategic possibilities than you'd expect from a mere four shapes. Gunpey is the kind of puzzler that will leave you with visions of the tiles connecting in your head, mentally putting together super-structures that would be tricky, but not impossible with a bit of luck, to create in-game. There aren't a lot of puzzlers that do this, and if it wasn't for Gunpey's shortcomings it would be a sure sign of gaming greatness.
|
