Review: 5-In-1 Arcade Hits

Developer: Grip Games

Publisher: Grip Games

We all love a bit of variety, don’t we? Grip Games – a new development studio – recently released their first game, 5-in-1 Arcade Hits, for all of you out there who do. Instead of focusing solely on one game, they decided to roll 5 into one, neat little minis package. You have card games, such as Pairs and Solitaire, mixed in with slider puzzles, Pool and even a brick-breaking bonanaza called Tetroid. I’ll run you through all of them one by one, starting with…

Pairs

I’m sure most of you have played this at some point in your lives. You flip over pairs of cards and if the symbols match they disappear and you get some points, with your goal to match up all the pairs. At the end of the day it’s just a memory test, with large points rewards for chaining correct pairs. There are three difficulty levels to choose from, with each one changing the symbols on the cards in an attempt to confuzzle your brain. If you’re playing on easy each pair will have distinct pictures, giving you a better opportunity to memorise which ones are in what position. Normal gives you pairs of numbers to match and hard mode offers you oriental symbols. Pairs does offer a two-player mode where you take it in turns to match cards, and when all pairs are matched the player with the highest score is declared the victor. Pairs isn’t hugely addictive and won’t keep you hooked for long unless you’re really into memory games. It’s not much of an arcade game, either.

15Puzzle

This is probably the least enjoyable of all the games offered in the mini and is also not strictly an arcade game. It’s exactly the same as those board-slider games where you must re-arrange all the pieces into the correct order, either to form a number sequence or picture. Your score starts at 30,000 and 100 points are deducted for every move you make, so your aim is to try and unscramble the board in as few moves as possible. As you’re only allowed to move one piece at a time it can take a fair amount of time to accomplish this, providing you haven’t given up and quit to play one of the other games on offer.

Pool

The third game available does exactly what it says on the tin, albeit with an Arcade twist. It’s a top-down version of the classic game, with all the standard rules: you must pot all the coloured balls before potting the black. Chaining those pots together racks up score combos, so there’s incentive to pick your shots carefully to avoid breaking the chain. You aren’t able to take too long, though, because the clock is ticking and your final score is dependant on how fast you can clear the table. You can hold the X button to charge your shot, giving you the opportunity to carefully clip the ball into the pocket or smack it as hard as you can. There are even arrows that appear on the ball you’re aiming at, showing which direction it’s going to go in. If you want to play with a friend you can take it in turns to pot balls in a full game of Pool, complete with solids and stripes. Both modes are great fun to play and it’s a nice little version of the game which you can easily lose quite a bit of time in.

Solitaire

Next on the game roster is our old favourite Solitaire. If you haven’t played Solitaire before, where have you been all this time? The 5-in-1 Arcade Hits version works perfectly and is extremely easy to play; the d-pad moves the cursor over the cards, you use X to pick up or place cards and can press ‘triangle’ to automatically send cards to home. You gain points for correct card placement, but lose 100 for each second that passes, so you’ll need to send all those cards home as fast as possible. It’s not an original choice, nor your classic arcade game, but for all those out there who love card games then this version will satisfy your Solitaire needs, and, let’s be honest, who doesn’t like Solitaire? There are two difficulty settings on offer, so hardcore Solitaire players can pitch their skills against a tougher game.

Tetroid

Tetroid is essentially a version of breakout, but played sideways and with walls of bricks that move towards you. Breaking the bricks with the ball before they reach you is the name of the game, and if they manage to reach your (oddly-shaped) paddle it’s game over for you. It’s a fairly hard game to begin with, as the bricks form random patterns and you aren’t able to predict what you’re going to get. Certain bricks only take one hit before breaking, some take several and others are explosive, so when you hit them they’ll destroy neighbouring bricks. Due to the randomness you may get a load of explosive bricks and can easily clear the way, but restarting the game could provide you with an impenetrable wall of multi-hit bricks. Score multipliers sometimes appear out of broken bricks, as do multi-ball tokens; pick up one of these and you’ll get three balls to bounce around instead of one.

As with Pairs and Pool there is a two-player mode on offer, which plays a lot like Pong. There’s a wall of bricks in the middle which can make the game extremely tedious, as it takes a while for you to break through and get the ball to the other side of the screen. When you do eventually manage this, the other player has normally been given enough time to get in position. Both players share the PSP, with one using the d-pad to control the paddle and the other using the face buttons. Tetroid is an interesting concept and quite fun once you get used to it, but it lacks any difficulty options.

Conclusion

Overall, 5-in-1 Arcade Hits is a decent collection. Out of all the games on offer, Pool, Solitaire and Tetroid are the only ones I can see myself playing in the future, but it’s your personal taste that will determine which games you’ll enjoy most.  Whilst Pairs and 15Puzzle play perfectly, they’re not the most exciting games and definitely aren’t what I would call “Arcade Hits”, so could easily have been omitted to make way for two other, more exciting games. Whilst most games have a small selection of options, it would have been nice to see some of them, such as Tetroid, fleshed out a bit more.

The replay value is definitely there with medals awarded for getting high scores, so there’s always the incentive to go back and try to get gold medals for all game modes. Grip have also put in a leaderboard system on their own site; the game will generate a code which contains your score and medal data – simply create an account and enter the code to upload your medals and progress, and also see your place on the leaderboards. It’s a neat way to get around the lack of network connection.

So, 5-in-1 Arcade Hits is definitely worth taking a look at for the amount of content on offer and is great value for the price. Some of the titles chosen for the collection are questionable, but you’ll no doubt enjoy most of them. Just probably not 15Puzzle.