Slide Colors is a pure puzzle game bent on making you think laterally to solve it’s many levels. Control of the game consists of sliding a whole row or column at a time to move tiles in a grid. The game is essentially divided into 3 main styles of game-play.
In Puzzle Mode, you have to arrange the given tiles into the required positions. This was my favourite mode of the three, as you really had to think several moves ahead on some levels. The first few are not so bad as you have the outside edges that you can use to build rows, but later these are used and it the difficulty really ramps up!
In Time Attack mode we return to our old friend, Match-3. You arrange the tiles to create rows or columns of 3 or more identical shapes. Your goal here is to reach the number of required matches for each level. I did feel that the match-3 detection was not perfect here and sometimes missed double matches I had made, for example: a match vertical and horizontal that shared tiles did not always get detected and only one row/column would be removed. This got more frustrating later on in this mode when I was trying to be clever, not that I’m too good at that anyway!
The Clear Blocks mode has you matching each tile on the board at least once, using the match-3 mechanic again. I found this more fun than mode 2 because I had a more visible goal to achieve.
It’s a slightly hard game to define. It’s not exactly what would be described as a casual-game. It’s more of a hard-core puzzle game, and it’s presented well in that respect. There’s an emphasis on score, and achievements you can earn if you manage to complete the modes on normal and hard setting.
It’s a challenging game that keeps you on your toes. It’s not for everyone but you can’t fault the polish there. The music and sound are good but I really wanted a bit more variety in the level music, even one alternative track would have made the difference here. Additionally, sometimes the controls can be a little annoying, deciding that you wanted to slide horizontally rather than vertically (or visa versa). Otherwise this is a worthy challenge for any puzzle fan, and for the price it represents good value for the time you’ll spend with those slide-colors.
Score: 68 out of 100
Final words: Hard Core Puzzling lateral thinking goodness.
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