Ewan checks out the latest Tetris-variant/wannabe, Flying Drop, and finds it distinctly lacking in variation, addictiveness and fun. Which is not to say that it lacks colour or promise - it's just not very good as it stands. Here's the Flying Drop review.

Here we go again! It's a grid based game, with some coloured balls, and you have to make shapes to make some of them disappear and score points. Is Flying Drop going to last on my handset more than a few days, or is it going to be a short affair?

It's the latter. While Flying Drop is a competent piece of gaming code, it doesn't have the spark that lifts a good idea for a challenging game into something that creates a need to play. The main issue is that there is no pressure put on the player, be it through a time limit or a game mechanism that forces a change in gameplay.

Taking the blue riband game in this style, Tetris, that game has an implied time limit through the falling pieces to the bottom of the gaming area, and a changing game mechanism as the piled up blocks reach the top of the screen. Flying Drop, even with the implications in the name, lacks gravity.

Flying Drop is more a jigsaw style of game than Tetris. Each awkwardly shaped piece can be rotated and placed anywhere into the gaming grid, as long as the space is clear. You have a choice of game 'modes', so elements of each piece will be deleted (and gain a score) either when a straight line is made of 5 identically coloured elements, or a 2x2 square of elements. Once these are made, 'poof' they disappear, more space is made on the grid, and the game carries on asking you to do the same again. And again.

And that's it.

Controls are pretty simple, with your piece dragged to the correct location by either touch (on S60 5th Edition) or the cursor keys on 3rd Edition. You can spin it through 90 degrees to get the orientation you want, then select the next place for the first piece. I've no complaints about this, it's fast and works. You can't expect to have any more than that.

Being able to choose lines or squares means this could easily be seen as a “two for one” game, but the underlying skill and mental rules of thumb required to play each mode are very similar.

It's a good mechanic for a game, make no mistake about that. But the lack of anything to increase the tension in the game beyond the pieces being placed on the grid, the lack of increasing difficulty or skill, the constant... same-y-ness of Flying Drop makes for a frustrating game. There is promise here, but it needs a lot of work on the secret sauce of addictiveness to garner a recommendation. I'd love to see this reworked and re-released, but for now, it's not something that I'll be coming back to in its present form.

-- Ewan Spence, Sept 2010.