Whenever I play most of the games by Popcap, oftentimes I can’t help but think that I’ve ‘been there, done that’.
Take Astro Pop, for example, it’s a pretty blatant clone of a kind-of-obscure game called ‘Magical Drop‘. So, if you know how to play that game, then you pretty much know everything you need to play this one.
Basically, there’s some story about some guys that go through space for some reason, why is pretty immaterial. What you need to know is that there is a series of colored bricks that descend from the top of the screen if they hit the bottom, well, then you lose. But you’re not totally defenseless, you have the ability to grab as many of the same colored block as you can and then throw them up to the top of the screen. Match up four or more in any direction and they disappear, and if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can try to set up chain reactions.
I only played Astro Pop one time, mostly because it was not on my Xbox 360 (which means it was free to me) and because I was really bored (compiling software takes a long time). So I played it and made it to the mid-teens, all the while thinking that I had already played this game before.
So, after that little experience I decided to pack this game back up and not play it again.
And that doesn’t really have that much to do with the fact that I don’t actually own an Xbox 360 of my own.