The game presents itself with a somewhat flimsy but adorable narrative about a character trapped in a book about Greek mythology. Her name is Cassandra, a lovely, alabaster skinned Helena of Troy with green eyes and shimmering blonde hair who cries out to Lex for aid. As a bookworm, of course, he feels the need to do the gentlemanly thing, jump between the leaves and leap to her aid. To do so, he must wade through enemies right out of the Iliad and the Odyssey—with no small Greek names to go along with them.

Each chapter is basically a series of enemies who stand on one side of the screen, facing Lex, and wield all manner of weapons, claws, teeth, and foul magics against him. He fights back with his gift of gab—and sometimes truly wince-inducing wit—in the form of spelling words. The longer the word, the greater the damage inflicted on his opponent. This remains the basic puzzle solving mechanism throughout the game. His enemies and Lex himself both have a set of hearts representing health. Run out of hearts, lose the game.

From here, things get interesting.

The first element that adds RPG elements to this otherwise rail-shooter of a spelling puzzle game is a variety of interesting abilities that opponents have. They run a staple sort of attacks that poison or set Lex on fire, continuing to inflict extra damage over time; and also opponents who can stun him for a round while they line up to hit him again; but the real cheerful fun comes from those abilities that affect Lex’s spelling tiles. Some opponents are capable of cracking tiles, making them useless for inflicting damage.

The next element is special items—treasures purloined from beating bosses at the end of each chapter. Every special item adds another effect to Lex’s arsenal, from a special bow that makes tiles of ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘Z’ inflict extra damage to foes when used to the golden fleece that reduces damage. While Lex can only carry three of these at a time, he can stack up quite an inventory to choose from which may change the player’s strategic inclination through different chapters.

Finally are puzzle elements involving the tiles; as the game progresses Lex can gain jeweled tiles from successfully spelling words over 4 letters long. Emeralds, rubies, sapphires—each of which causes its own special effect. Emerald: healing; amethyst: poisons enemy; ruby: lights the enemy on fire. To bring the tiles into effect, Lex needs only to use the letter tile with the jewel in the word he spells.

The primary complaint anyone might have about this game is that it’s extremely simplistic. It lacks overall challenge when it comes to word choice and developing strategy; but really the enjoyment of this game for us came from visiting mythological narratives, meeting strange an exotic characters, and getting to beat the everloving crap out of them with our spelling skills.

(And, of course, there is something truly amusing about beating Alexander with the word “EROTIC.”)

AstroPop presents itself as an action puzzler involving another color matching mechanism that we’ve seen many times before. It sets itself aside from other games by presenting a new way to approach this color matching. Bricks arrive from the top of the screen with the player at the bottom. The player flies a ship with the ability to grab blocks from the descending colorful menace up to a stack of four, and can release them back. Matching four or more blocks causes them to vanish as per usual.

While matching is certainly easy by just nabbing blocks and moving them around, it’s also quite possible to open up access to deep veins of blocks and to then eliminate them in one fell swoop. As the bricks become more and more random and mixed the more difficult it is to set up combos or even produce rapid matches—and as the game continues the roof will descend with accelerating speed.

Each of the characters also have special abilities affixed to their ships. Once triggered, the special can certainly turn the tide of the game. Two characters are immediately available; the other two must be “rescued” by playing through levels—there is a narrative to their rescues that can be read. The two we played had abilities that dealt with clearing out bricks with either firepower or by sweeping away segments of the playing field. Presumably the remaining two characters also had interesting special abilities to enhance game play.

Both special bricks and obstacles also come into play. Special bricks including explosive bricks that vaporize nearby bricks and hyperbricks that increase score. There are also “dead” bricks that cannot be matched to any others, but do pop when bricks near them are matched up.

The game, however, felt like it lacked replay value. Like any action style arcade it certainly kept us on our toes; however, as any astute reader has seen up to this point, us voces don’t like being kept on our toes by timers. The arcade style puzzler adds in the “falling doom” effect that makes it harder and harder to keep up with the rapidly descending wall of bricks, until finally we get crushed.

It’s hard to recommend this game even to avid arcade puzzle gamers. It’s a common meme found in a lot of games like this and it has been done better in the past.

The game itself is remarkably similar to the original title of Bejeweled: take a 2D grid of gemstones of various colors, exchange the positions of the precious gems to match them in rows, once matched they shatter and their neighbors collapse in to take up the emptied space. The twist of Bejeweled Twist, of course, happens to be all about “rotating” gems. Instead of the traditional, pick two and switch their places, the cursor instead spins four gems.

The matching still works similarly to the original game—make a match of three or more gemstones in a row or column and bam! there they go. For added effect, matching four jewels creates an exploding gem of the same type that, when matched, detonates, destroying the gems around it. Matching five creates a lightning gem that, also when matched, discharges electricity across the entire board vertically and horizontally, shattering all the gems it touches. Touching off a lightning gem can be exhilarating to watch.

In fact, with these new types of added gemstones and the special effects that follow them, scintillating and enjoyable combos can be triggered that dance like glorious fireworks. Here comes in a cute little addition for anyone who just couldn’t get enough of it once: Instant Replay.

Players are given an infinite number of spins to produce a match; but are given an incentive to get a match every time as there is a points accelerator attached to making matches. As the player makes matches it rises from x1 to x2 to … much, much higher. Except that every time the player fails to make a match they can lose a multiplier, until it falls all the way back to x1 and they have to rebuild it. The strategies invited by this become quite interesting: go for the combo that will set off a series of lightning and flame gems? or play it cool, matching three at a time while stacking on the multipliers?

To add strategies there are also in-game challenges to match particular gems in series. Managing to get those matches (without extra spins) adds quite a few points and a good feeling afterwards.

During game play obstacles are also thrown at the intrepid player. Pieces of coal get mixed into the mess. Coal cannot be matched; but it can be destroyed by fire and lightning gems. The next obstacle—existing in the normal game play—are explosives. These gems appear with counters on them that tick down with each spin. Fail to match/destroy a detonator gem before it’s spin counter times out and it goes critical. During critical the player is given one last chance to save themselves—and their game—from failure by playing a type of roulette. The odds get worse each time thereafter, so stopping bomb gems becomes a priority on later levels.

To add sheer challenge and joy to the game, Bejeweled Twist also has challenge levels specifically for people like us voces. These are a series of planets accessible from the main menu that set up particular challenges like: create a 5-combo, or destroy eight pieces of coal in one move, or shatter these types of jewels in this sequence. Finishing off these planets can be a great source of satisfaction, especially because some of them teach and demonstrate new strategies for game play involving the use of the twist mechanism to get gems into position and set them up to bring them crashing down.

As a casual game, Bejeweled Twist really kept our attention. It has a beautiful fireworks display sort of affect; keeps us on our toes while trying to keep our minds nimble during the boring workday; and has helped, more than once, to provide a much needed escape from idle doldrums.