Home Page / ds / P / Puyo Pop Fever / Review Listing / Review

In Puyo Pop Fever you get the chance to battle your friends or enemies (sometimes one in the same) to a side by side battle. If you don't have any  friends that have this game, the option still stands to battle against an AI. In a side by side battle, both of you are trying to cause the other to fill up their screen and be unable to pop anymore Puyo. For those of you that have never seen the Puyo Pop series, it is a similar concept to Tetris. You are trying to get 4 or more Puyo of the same color together in order to pop them. Try to set them up so you can get multiple combos and cause blank Puyo to drop into the screen of your opponent blocking their moves until they clear them. Unlike Tetris, the Puyo drop from above in any combination of 2 to 4 of varying color combinations. They will continue to drop until they land on top of another one. If any of the Puyo are not on top of another one, they will separate from the grouping and continue to drop.

In the single player mode you have three courses to choose from: training course, beginner’s course and advanced course. There is also a free battle area which allows you to battle any opponent you want so you can get some practice battling them and learn a little about their skills. If you have not played Puyo Pop before I highly recommend taking the training course.

There is also a mode called Everybody Puyo Pop which allows you to play against a friend using the wireless feature of the Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, I do not know anyone that has the game and a Nintendo DS to try that mode. The final mode allows you to play Puyo Pop as long as you can. The Puyos steadily start falling quicker and quicker as you play. See how long you can last before the Puyo have no room to fall.

The game follows Amitie through her adventures where she battles foes to continue on to the next region she needs to get to. Between each region she travels along and tells of her tale and meets up with the next challenger. The one nice feature is that if you really want to, they have given the ability to skip the story and jump straight into battling the next foe. After the first time of hearing and reading the story I definitely found myself using this feature.

The new addition to the Puyo Pop genre is the Fever mode. This is an important mode to learn how to activate. In this mode you start with 15 seconds of time, which is added to while you are working on getting into that mode, in which you try to create as many chains as possible and clear the screen. The Puyo are arranged in such a way that if you set the dropping Puyo correctly you can clear the screen and earn more time. Once you clear one grouping of four or more and no others clear then the screen clears and a new set of Puyo are set up for you to try again. This continues until you run out of time in which you return to where you left off. The fever mode is the quickest and most effective way to eliminate your opponent.

Overall I found this game to be as addictive as Tetris was. It is a fun game that has some different twists that keeps you from getting bored. I look forward to being able to play this on the next trip I take where I will have plenty of spare time to kill. I can easily play this game for hours.