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Rock Blast (DS) Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored I started playing this game on Sunday 13 December, 2020 // I stopped playing this game on: Tuesday 15 December, 2020
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
December 15, 2020 07:53:28 PM
Like many of these (I assume) budget DS titles I've been playing, there is more to this game than initially meets the eye and there's little nuggets of game design variation I found interesting. The game is a pre-historic themed puzzle bobble/snood-type game. Having you're shooting down instead of up, and the rocks you need to destroy move up because they're floating in a crater full of lava that's filling up. As you'd imagine the rocks come in different colors and so on. Here are some of the main features that I found interesting though: (a) Occasionally you get rocks with symbols inside them that, when "exploded" have some effect - some give you cash, others increase a bonus score multiplier, trigger an explosion, freeze the rising, and so on. What's interesting is that sometimes the rocks you launch have the symbols, so it's not just that they appear in the playfield. (b) If you manage to "prune a branch" by getting a match that results in some blocks hanging free (and dropping) - you don't actually get the symbol bonus (if any). I was surprised by this, since I had expected that anything you cleared from the playfield would help. But nope. (c) You earn cash to then upgrade some dinosaur animal helpers - they each have a different power that you can trigger every now and then. Weirdly I upgraded one all the way - but then the bar reset and, as far as I could tell, the dino was the same. The dino friend effects are all pretty weak (not really "super game changing") so I didn't ever use them unless in a critical situation - but I was really surprised by what seems to be an upgrade "rollover". (d) One of the helper dinos is a pterodactyl that flies around dropping bombs that make a rock disappear. It's an interesting effect because it's mostly useful/very minor and sometimes gets in the way - by for example destroying a rock I needed for a match! (which hurts especially when it was a cash rock and I was trying to hoard cash to get more upgrades to the dinos) (e) Sometimes - I don't know if I triggered this or if it's a level setting - the playfield would widen significantly OR contract significantly. The dynamic changing was interesting and fun and definitely mixed things up.

Rock Blast (DS)