Review: Bejeweled 2 Deluxe

Developer: PopCap Games

Publisher: PopCap Games

Cast your mind back to 2001: Tony Blair is in power, we’d all gotten over that silly “New Millenium” thing, the Y2K “virus” failed to show up significantly and the world was brought Nintendo’s GameCube, Game Boy Advance, and Microsoft’s BrickBox XBox.

But there was another significant event in the gaming world in 2001: PopCap Games released Thingimywhotsit Bejeweled as an in-browser Flash game. And lo, the internet was engulfed with many a user becoming engrossed in the gem-swapping mini-epic. The original is so good it has birthed so many clones it’s unreal. To this day, Bejeweled, as a franchise, is still in the top ten best-selling games of all time. Not bad for a measly Flash game, eh?

In 2004, PopCap released Bejeweled 2, a revamp of the classic game with new visuals and the same classic gem-swapping gameplay. The formula is prety much the same: match groups of three or more of the same colour/shape gems by moving adjacent ones to remove them from the board and score points. It’s the standard match-three formula, and it doesn’t change.  At all.  which is good, because it just works, simple as. It’s another simple game which is insanely addictive:  you can whittle away days of your life without realising it, it’s that good…

You’re given 4 game modes from the off: Classic, Action, Puzzle and Endless.

Classic is just pure Bejeweled gameplay.  There’s no timer and the game ends when you run out of moves.  Simple as.

Action is more like the original Bejeweled; your score bar starts at halfway, and decreases as time goes by, so you need to match gems to advance and fill the bar up fully.

Puzzle is an untimed puzzle mode which offers various layouts of gems and you need to clear the board.

Endless is exactly like Classic, but you can never run out of moves, and can keep playing for years if you want.

The addition of power gems granted when you match four in a row, which explode when matched, and Hyper Cubes (when you match 5 in a row) which zap and remove all the gems on the board which match the one you swap it with, is nice and offers a bit of depth to the standard gameplay. Plus, there are four extra unlockable game modes which are variations on the four standard, but you need to perform special tasks to get them (ie: finish puzzle mode, beat a certain level, etc.).

The visuals are good: there’s no glitching, but other than that, they’re pretty boring, with not much going on, though the gems look nice and sparkle occasionally.  The backgrounds are somewhat interesting, spacious vistas depicting the landscapes of other planets.  One thing of note is the between level animation, which is like a psychedelic wormhole ala StarGate or Doctor Who on acid.  Nice, but ultimately superficial and only there to tie in with the space-age feeling that we’re given by the game. But that’s just dressing up that isn’t needed with this type of game.

The sound effects are nice, but they do get a bit samey after a little while, and the ambient music, though well done, is more grating than anything, so pretty soon you may be reaching for the volume slider.  Other than that, the voice over man is pretty neat, in that he sounds like Dr. Manhattan sounded like when you did his voice in your head while reading ‘Watchmen’, rather than Billy Crudup.  No, just me then?  OK.  Moving on.

In all, it’s a nice package which lets you play away from the browser as a standalone game, as most PopCap games can be.  The formula is one we’ve seen before, but it is a part of the series that started the revolution, so I’m inclined to enjoy it more than a cheap clone.

A truly excellent little gem of a game, only hampered by the “been there, done that” feeling that the entire subset of the puzzle game genre gives.  No gamer should be deprived of this type of game.