Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Droplitz Review for Xbox 360

Droplitz Review for Xbox 360

Dropkicked By Goop

One of the great things about the puzzle genre is the games don’t always need to have a presentation packed with tons of glitz and glamour in order to spur you to drop hours upon hours into playing them. Some of the best puzzle games ever created are incredibly simple in their design. Developers can often do a lot with a limited, bare-bones setup as long as the underlying gameplay is fun and challenging. Blitz Arcade’s new Xbox LIVE puzzler Droplitz contains both elements in ample supply, though the latter crops up a bit more readily.

Droplitz screenshot

If you’ve ever had to deal with leaky pipes causing drop-by-drop water damage in several different areas of your ceiling all at once, then the concept of Droplitz should be a familiar one. Playing the role of impromptu virtual puzzle-plumber and re-routing the heinous flow of a mysterious substance to where you want it to go is bound to wind up leading to moments of frustration – at least until you’ve polished your skills. But sticking with the drippy mess long enough eventually yields a puzzle nirvana that makes the steep challenge worth the effort.

An array of disarmingly pleasant and colorful background themes temporarily masks the more sadistic elements of Droplitz’s gameplay. Bubbly pink hearts, sandy sea shells and palm trees, earthy leaves and acorns, and other skins complement the soothing hues of the game’s minimalistic visuals. The unobtrusive electronica slinks around in the background, lending another layer of laid back mellowness. What the game lacks in visual and audio complexity it makes up for in difficulty. Don’t get lulled into a false sense of complacency, because Droplitz will quickly dropkick you back into reality.

The grid-based playing field is made up of interlocking stacks of round pieces that can be individually rotated to the left or the right. Each piece has a different set of pipe-like markings on it that can be used to form branching networks of tunnels. In each round, nozzles located at the top of the board gradually release liquid droplitz that flows downward. When they hit sharp edges and forking paths, the droplitz divide and branch off. Any drops that run into a dead-end pipe that’s not connected properly are lost. The objective is to speedily twist together enough fully connected pipelines to lock-in lit pathways that ensure each precious drop of the substance makes it into a proper collecting bin. You’re awarded bonus points for connecting combos in one shot and saving the maximum amount of the drippy goop possible. Conserving the stuff is of the utmost importance, since you’re only given a finite amount of droplitz (tracked by a small meter) that can only be replenished when you pull of combos and score. Run out of droplitz and the game ends immediately, forcing you to start over from scratch.

Droplitz screenshot

Droplitz’s functional controls aren’t the easiest to get used to. Moving your cursor around the game board is done with the D-pad. This occasionally feels clunky when quickly moving across larger boards, and it’s easy to visually lose track of where the cursor is located when things get really hectic. Rotating the pieces clockwise or counterclockwise are done with the B and A buttons respectively, while X temporarily speeds up the board and Y button triggers special powers or other play modes. Properly using the two-directional twist controls takes some time to learn, but it greatly helps your accuracy and saves time once it’s mastered. Generally, the controls aren’t much of a bother until you reach those inevitable moments where everything is on the brink of completely falling apart.

It initially takes your brain a little time to get used to having to frantically scan the board and twist together pathways for the goop to follow. The game’s intensity momentarily subsides each time you properly form a successful pipeline – securing some measure of limited safety until the next round begins – though it greatly increases once again when the droplitz meter runs low and you’ve yet to complete the necessary paths. Any pieces that have been formed into pathways are cleared at the end of each round and new ones drop into their place. The difficulty scales upward every few rounds, as more complex pieces fall into place and the speed of the droplitz descent increases. The entire progress system is based on keeping things flowing to continually boost your score.

Droplitz screenshot

You’ll start out in classic mode, which offers nine unlockable levels of varying difficulty to play through. In order to unlock each level, you’ll have to achieve certain high score benchmarks in adjacent levels. While this sounds straightforward, it’s by no means easy.

Droplitz screenshot

Accruing the necessary points feels like an, almost unreachable challenge even in the first few levels. The daunting scoring goals you’re faced with early on ramp up as you progress through the game and unlock more content. Harder levels are larger in size, forcing you to make lengthier pathways, and have more nozzles depositing.

Droplitz three additional play modes offer decent variations on the main theme, but they too are unlocked gradually by reaching certain high scores. Zendurance lets you pick from any of the visual themes you’ve unlocked and simply play a single game until you lose. Power Up Mode tosses pickups into the mix, letting you freeze time, slow the drops, and chuck bombs to blast away pieces on the board. For the hardcore puzzle crowd, Infected Mode adds another layer of challenge by causing pieces to become infected with green slime. The pieces rotate slower and spread the infection to other nearby pieces until they’re cleared.

Though the difficulty can be hard to swallow at times, the puzzle gameplay quickly grows on you. It presents the kind of obstacles that really push players to go back repeatedly to strive for the best possible score. However, the disappointment can be substantial when you’ve done your best in game-after-game only to fail to reach the goal by a thousand points or less. If it weren’t for the extremely tough-to-achieve high scores needed to unlock much of the game’s content, Droplitz would ultimately be a much smoother and far more enjoyable ride. Regardless, it still offers a moderate amount of puzzle fun.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 3.2 Graphics
A colorful but bare-bones presentation. 3.6 Control
Somehow both simple and tricky to manage at first, the controls eventually come around. 3.4 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Standard electronica that fades into the background. 3.8 Play Value
Solid gameplay and lots of unlockables are hampered by the grueling score benchmarks needed to progress. 3.6 Overall Rating – Good
Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.

Game Features:

  • Rotate dials to create paths to let the Droplitz flow and earn high scores.
  • Four different addictive modes – Classic, Zendurance, Power Up, and Infection.
  • Ever-increasing speeds and larger boards ensure you’ll always have a challenge ahead.
  • Show everyone you’re the best with online leaderboards, trophies, and achievements.

  • To top