Brutal Gamer

Peggle: Dual Shot Review (DS)

By Zeth - March 18, 2009 - 19:09 UTC

Man I loved Peggle on the PC. Damn thing sucked hours of my life away and left me wanting more. So much so that I also picked up Peggle Nights too! Well luckily for you DS owning Peggle virgins you get both Peggle & Peggle nights in one handy package! So what is all the fuss about this weird Unicorn game with the balls?

Well as I said Peggle started life on the PC, being unleashed on the world by Popcap Games it seemed to strike that elusive golden chord that drew in casual (yeuch!) and hardcore (double yeuch! I hate those terms!) gamers in the thousands. Like so many before it Peggle requires you to do just one task – that’s all – just one tiny simple task. Clear the screen of the colored pegs. Yeah that’s it, no space marines or physics defying back flips to perform. just hit the pegs with your little silver ball – yawn!

The actual story is utter bollocks – ignore it unless your a 7 year old girl (weekends don’t count!). You basically meet a friendly Unicorn named Bjorn who introduces you to the Peggle Institute (told you it was balls!). He tells you that 10 Peggle Masters want to help teach you all about the game. Basically each “master” is a boss character you play past as you progress through the stages. I think we can all agree that possible 17.476 seconds went in to story development and character development

Graphically Peggle looks nice. The characters are well drawn and brightly colored. The backdrops look sublime and well crafted and the small colored pegs look… Very peggy. There is little in the way of character animations to be honest but there are plenty of spot effects and the final modes and powerup special effects look nice and are rewarding to obtain.

To give an example of gameplay, you start the first level and are presented with the play screen, you must move your line of fire from left to right lining up your shot until your happy to unleash the ball (you do this with the DS stylus). When your happy you tap the screen and unleash the small silver ball onto the pegs below. The playing field below you filled with pegs or blocks of various colors, blue pegs are obstacles, Orange pegs are what you want to remove, Purple or Gold pegs are bonuses, and Green pegs are power-ups. Power-ups vary depending on level eg the Dragon let you use a fireball. At the bottom of your play area is a small “basket” that will sometimes bounce your ball back up into the peg area or if your lucky catch your ball giving you it back to use another time – as balls are limited to a certain number on each level. If your shot misses the basket it is lost and you lose the ball for good.

You can earn extra shots (balls) by clearing multiple pegs at a time or by hitting a gold peg and entering the pinball mini-game. Once you clear the final peg the screen zooms on and goes slow motion on the ball as it bounces off the last peg. You are then presented with several “exit gates” for your ball at the bottom of the screen. Each gate is worth a different bonus amount and you just wait as the ball arcs about and falls down to see what score you get.

Sound design is reasonable and many small ditties and tunes squawk their way out of the DS’s limited sound system. The Spot effects are great and the little riffs you get when you enter fever mode or finish the level all add to the enjoyment. The sound never reaches that totally annoying level that some puzzlers inflict and will most likely remain on throughout your time playing.

This all sounds very tame and a little crappy, but it’s when you get control of the thing that the beauty of Peggle really hits you. Like Tetris and other since you will just pick it up for a quick play and find yourself swearing at the damn ball 2 hours later still intending to have “just one more try!” before calling it quits.

Longevity depends on how much you get out of the game to be honest. The progression starts off fairly easy and you will fly though the early levels pretty quickly. It will take a fair amount of playtime to clear your way through the remaining “Masters” on Peggle before you turn your attention to Peggle Nights. Nights is just more of the same only it starts harder than Peggle does and gets harder quicker. I put many hours into Peggle on the PC and on my mobile but still managed around 8 or 9 hours on the DS and I’m still playing The controls work well enough on the DS using the stylus but can become frustrating when your trying to line up a shot and your hand is in the line of vision.

Final thought …. The game will suck hours of your life away. Much like Puzzle Quest & Bejeweled I do think you will reach a saturation point and you will turn your back on Peggle for some time – possibly forever. While it lasts this is a great distraction and a frustratingly addictive game. It frustrates mainly because there is very little skill involved in the game, a lot of the time it can boil down to chance and dumb luck – but it always remains good fun.

Many have described Popcap as peddlers of digital crack – I don’t think I can out do that analogy!

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