Avalanche Review

As if the Zodiac needs any more puzzle games, Backbone Entertainment dumps (get it?) yet another one onto our beloved handheld platform. Its name is Avalanche, a game that involves balls, and lots of them. These balls have a tendency to freeze over. Maybe that’s because it’s freezing outside, playing atop a mountain?

Alright, so here’s the background. The only way to prevent from being buried in an avalanche, you have to connect the black spheres in each level to open the tunnel. This tunnel is located at the bottom of the screen.

Balls will fill the screen, where you’ll, using color coordination, will have to clear the screen of three balls of the same color, one at a time, until all the black spheres connect at the bottom. Classic has you grouping in pairs of three and connecting the black spheres. These black spheres can be one, two, or three, depending on the level.

Once the screen fills with balls, it will freeze, and the game ends. This takes a while to happen, but there are some preventative measures that you can take to eliminate that risk, aside from grouping the balls. If you fill the avalanche meter, the balls will explode and pop into the air. You can use the ‘quake ball’ to pop the balls into the air, reordering them. Last, you can use ‘color blast’ balls to remove all balls of a certain color.

Avalanche comes with three game modes: classic, puzzle, and tactics. Classic is outlined in the paragraph above. Puzzle has you destroy patterns of frozen balls by grouping balls of the same color. You may also have to free the black sphere in some of these levels, as they could be surrounded by frozen balls. Finally, tactics has you destroy clusters of balls that will regenerate. Your goal is to fill the avalanche meter.

With over twenty levels, and three game modes, Avalanche is a highly recommendable puzzle game to those interested in the genre. The Zodiac might have more puzzle games than the Xbox has first-person shooters, but if you’re not tired of them yet, give Avalanche a try. Its gameplay might have you addicted until the next-generation Zodiac is released.