I've had a blast with Bejeweled Twist, moreso than most puzzle games I come across. Is it fun, interesting, and addictive? You bet. Bookworm Adventures, Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, and even Peggle have done more for advancing originality in casual games. Is Bejeweled Twist a revolution to the puzzle genre? Not really.

In fact, an old Game Boy game called Brain Drain did something similar back in 1998.

Make more matches, however, and you'll begin to earn colored fruits which, in addition to getting rid of ticking bombs, offer a whole host of points as well as initiating grid-changing events that are a sight to see. Keep making matches without needlessly twisting gems and you'll earn ten times as many points for each row you obliterate. Each time you make successive matches a points multiplier increases on the left side of the screen. Here, however, you adopt a chess-like stance of careful observation. Most matching games pit you against the clock or otherwise rush you to do your job. Here's where Bejeweled Twist earns its hyper addictive nature. No need to learn a completely different genre of gameplay when you can make a familiar one new again. Same matching flavor, brand new method of play. Bejeweled Twist doesn't reinvent the match-3, it shuffles the base mechanics. After I played it for a few minutes, however, the magic became strikingly clear. I was initially let down when I saw the brave new gameplay mechanic was nothing more than a little twist. Practice makes perfect, and a little luck never hurts either.Īnalysis: I walked into Bejeweled Twist with high expectations. Getting to the top is a simple matter of learning the most effective way to play the game, then diving right in. In addition to points, Classic mode features stars you collect to earn a named rank. The overreaching goal in Bejeweled Twist is the same as most matching games: get a high score. Challenge is the most unique mode and sets you to a number of tasks (such as 'match eight gems with one move') to see how skilled you are at twisting. Zen mode is like Classic only without those stressful bombs getting in the way. Match the bombs to make them disappear, otherwise you'll have to spin a roulette wheel and hope you survive.īlitz mode features a similar setup but tasks you with scoring as many points as you can within five minutes. Bomb gems appear from time to time, ticking down to a game-ending explosion with each move you make. When its full, you blast off to the next world (puzzle grid) for more twisting. Classic will eat up the bulk of your time and features a loose space theme where you fill a ship's power tube by matching gems. After years of shameless clones, that's a very, very good thing.įour gameplay modes allow Bejeweled Twist to satisfy a wide range of puzzle gaming tastes: Classic, Blitz, Challenge, and Zen. But the twist changes things just enough so you have to teach yourself to play a match-3 all over again. The core matching mechanics are untouched, so gamers will immediately find familiar territory. Instead of clicking a single tile and then choosing an adjacent space to move it to, Bejeweled Twist turns your cursor into a 2x2 circle that spins its contents one quarter turn clockwise. So what's the big change? Twisting is in, swapping is out. Four years in the making, Bejeweled Twist is PopCap's latest installment in the well-recognized series that brings some much-needed freshness to a relatively stale genre. And that's not counting the hundreds of millions of times its been downloaded. First released in 2001, the now-classic match-3 puzzle game Bejeweled has sold more than 25 million copies in its lifetime.

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