Rainy Colors
by Trifaces
Studios, Price: $5.95
Reviewed November 2003
Pirate theme seems to be popular this year,
from John Depp movie to Rainy Colors. Developed by Trifaces
Studios, Rainy Colors is a puzzle game with a little pirate
story and a unique game play. The graphics are jazzed up
by polished packaging and bright colors. Playful sound effects
are accompanied by a variety of music tracks. What’s
the catch? If you are not good enough, you will get zapped
by the lightning courtesy of your archenemies.
The gameplay in Rainy color won’t
give you a déjà vu feeling that you have played
this game somewhere else. Unlike games such as Bejeweled,
you won’t need to slide gems to match the neighboring
gems. What you will do is to combine two gems with primary
colors (red, blue and yellow) and turn them into gems with
secondary colors. When gems with both primary and secondary
colors happen to line up in a group of three vertically,
horizontally or in an L shape, they will explore. The explosion
will not only get rid off these gems but also send thunder
bolts to your opponents. When the lightning zapped most of
the gems into white color and blocked other gems, the game
is over.
There are two playing modes, one is story
mode where you need to beat each guardians in the game to
reach the bad mean boss at the end, and the other one is
vs. mode where you can play against computer opponents or
a friend. There are also three difficulty settings in the
game as well. You control the game with stylus.
The graphics in Rainy Color give you the
impression that the developers have put a lot of thoughts
into creating a fun, colorful and coherent environment for
this puzzle game. Each battle in the puzzle will take you
to a different island where you will fight the guardian of
that island. Each island has its own background image, and
in vs. mode you can choose any of the backgrounds where in
Story mode you must travel to every island in your tour de
force. The gems move smoothly and change shapes from raindrops
to square gems after they landed on your board. You will
also enjoy little things like cow shedding tears after loosing,
dragon breathing fire and other character animations.
The music tracks are very enjoyable and
match the background theme in style. The Asian garden background
is accompanied by slow orient music where the adventure island
theme has a fast pace action music style. The sounds effects
include a variety of small FX pieces assigned to players’ reaction
to loosing, winning and wishing good luck, and thunders and
lightning that play big part in the game. Rainy Colors supports
Pocket PC with ARM/Xscale as well as MIPS processor, and
takes about 4MB storage space.
Rainy Colors puts thinking back into
the gem sliding puzzle games, and provides plenty of fun
and challenge. While the colorful graphics will likely
grab gamers attention, the nice little touches in the detail
give this game character. Even though it might take you
a little time to get used to spotting primary colors in
a fast pace, the puzzle genre fans will be glad that they
have paid a visit to the islands of rainy colors.
Playing Hints and Tips
Don’t wait for all the gems to settle
on the board, start sliding as soon as there are matching
gems available. Try to use the gems with primary colors on
the bottom of the board first so that you don’t waste
these moveable gems.
In the options, you can switch the
playing field from left to right, and vice versa. Use the
side that fits you better. |
