I don't envy developers who take on the task of designing a new puzzle game using colored blocks that drop from the top of the screen.
How many different ways are there to do it? "Roogoo," one of the new games on Xbox Live Arcade this week, gives it a shot.
And guess what: "Roogoo" succeeds.
The game is cute, fast, fun and absolutely brutal in multiplayer.
The phrase "easy to learn, hard to master" applies to "Roogoo" whole-heartedly. Colored shapes fall from the sky and must be stacked by players to drop to the next level. Stack enough and you'll reach the bottom, which clears that shape from the queue. Each level can be re-aligned by rotating with the Left Button or Right Button, while tapping A speeds up the drop speed.
It only takes 10 minutes to grasp the basics before you start upping the drop speed and replaying stages to beat your previous time. But it doesn't take long for "Roogoo" to introduce even more randomized elements, such as stages with flipping circles and enemies that are defeated with timed drop speed increases. One enemy, the butterfly, will actually fly away with your blocks if you're not careful.
I recently sat down with Scott March, president and creative director at SpiderMonk, the studio behind "Roogoo." I was the last person he was showing "Roogoo" to in the Bay Area, but also, according to him, the best player he'd seen so far. I almost managed to beat the creator of "Roogoo" at his own game, having played less than 30 minutes. The key word, however: almost.
Almost or not, it's also where I discovered where "Roogoo" shines brightest: multiplayer. Speed drops become crucial to success, but careless speed drops mean miscalculated drops. It doesn't take long for a match to swing back and forth between two players, as one player messes up and the other capitalizes by dropping junk on the other person's screen.
In "Roogoo," junk comes in the form of enemies. Successful chains generate points in a meter to the side. Fill up the meter and tap X to send enemies to the other side. Unlike other puzzle games, sending enemies isn't automatic. It becomes a strategic move.
The game's creator may have praised my skills, but I was still a newbie. Marsh loaded up some of the last levels of the game and showed off some of his high-level skills, which blew me away. He described high-level play as entering into a trance-like state. Everything would click into place and he'd finish the level in a matter of seconds, not second-guessing a single move.
I don't anticipate ever achieving that level of mastery in "Roogoo," but it was enough to prove to me that it's probably worth 800 Microsoft Points to puzzle fans this week.
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