Welcome to the newest GiN Feature: reviews of cell phone games. These mostly mini-reviews well go into detail about many of the top titles you can play on your cell phones. So you will now know if it is worth downloading them paying to play.
I was not to sure about PileUp! when I read the rules and started to play. What kept running through my mind was how fun could dropping balls into a big pile be? All your trying to do is match four balls of the same color. But then I kept playing it and playing it. I would even take breaks from other games so that I could go back and play PileUp again.
Even now as I write this review, I am itching to play one more time. All I can think of is going back and if I was like this when I first encountered TETRIS, and I am happy that I have returned the demo cell phone or I might still be playing and not getting any work done. WOW just like TETRIS and my school work.
When the game opens you see a small mound of multi-colored balls and you have a small block of three balls that are slowly falling. You can rotate the balls and shuffle through how they are arranged as they slowly fall. They stay together until they hit the bottom and then they fall apart, sometimes rolling down the side of a pile. Once you get four or more balls of the same color touching they flash and disappear and the surrounding balls fall to fill in the space, sometimes causing a cascade effect as more matching balls touch.
Off to the right of the screen is a picture showing the next set of balls that are coming, the level, and how many more balls you need to get correct before the level ends. If the balls reach the top of the screen you loose. Simple, and yet strangely appealing.
As the levels progress they naturally get harder, with the addition of more colors, other balls with special features and obstacles that are blocking the way to the bottom, thus making it harder to drop your balls where you want.
As I am fairly certain you can tell by now, I really liked this game. It does not have the stellar graphics of other cell phone games I played or amazing sound, but the game play was fun and challenging. Simply put I found the concept behind this game and the game play to be very appealing to me.
To really test the game in the right environment, I took PileUp, and several other games from the real arcade network, down into the subway and tested it on my commute. I mentally set a station several stops away and if I was enjoying the game and missed the stop I was looking for I took that as a good sign. I knew from playing the game earlier that I really liked it, and I knew I was hooked when I looked up and everyone was getting off the train at the end of the line and I had no idea where I was or that the train even went that far outside of the city. Oh well, more play time on the way back!