As the designated falling block aficionado of Two Fedoras, I love seeing what the Indie community can produce to iterate on such an already markedly established genre with so many classics. This brings us to XBLIG’s latest offering: Acupwnture.
Acupwnture is an unfortunately titled falling block game that, in attempting to be a difficult and unique member of its genre, almost misses the point of being a falling block puzzle game in the first place but still manages to deliver some solid block fun.
Gameplay
In the vein of your standard falling block games, blocks in Acupwnture arrive at the top of the screen, and move at a steady rate downward until they land on something below them. They have your control to shuffle them left and right, or rotate them. Blocks are two-piece composites pulling from five different colors, with the block removal mechanic working similarly to Chime and Lumines in that you have to create 2×2 squares of a single color to mark those squares for removal. You then have a set amount of “moves” (that is, block placements) during which you can continue to build using squares of the same color to increase the destruction, and therefore your score. In order to complete a level, you must destroy a certain number of blocks of each color type.
The extra twist in Acupwnture is that the five colors each correspond to a different element, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Metal. The game field itself is also aligned to an element, which informs not only the win conditions for the stage (in terms of how many removals of each element must occur) but also the stage’s “special ability.” I found the stage special abilities to be a nice twist, in that they spiced things up just enough, and gave a bit of flavor to each of the elements. Also nice is that the level timer itself helps to warn you of impending ability usage. Although what exactly you can do with that knowledge is lost on me.
The game bills itself as being “insanely difficult,” and to an extent it is. But what I enjoyed most about Acupwnture was discovering the little tricks to being successful in spite of that. Namely that making use of the “insta-drop” to save a massive amount of time was key to victory, as well as learning to use the “emergency” coins to clear the field of a chosen color block to help clear the way for creating a super block of a needed color. Finally, utilizing the fact that an exploding superblock will snake its way through any trail of singular blocks connected to it, destroying them all.
To get the most fun out of Acupwnture however, my advice is to give Standard Mode a miss entirely. Standard Mode plays out as a series of stages with the goal of clearing a specific number of each color type before it moves on to the next. There are tiers whereby it introduces more difficulty through adding to the number of elements of the board, which increases the “stage abilities” used against you. But in my mind, stage-based goal-oriented design isn’t what makes falling block games great. Instead, I suggest playing “Continuous Mode.” Rather than presenting you with a new board (and cleared score) between stages as Standard Mode does, Continuous Mode simply resets the goal counters and keeps on moving, while you shoot for the highest score you can. That’s the kind of play I can get behind.
The only other slight problem I have is with the controls. The block rotation buttons are A and B, with Y serving as the “emergency coin” thrower. Personally, I like using the triggers for block rotation and an options menu to let me set controls would have been nice.
Audio/Visual
The graphics in Acupwnture are fairly well done. I can’t say I’m a fan of using so many off-standard fonts in various places and various styles, but at least they’re legible, unlike some other block games. The backgrounds are nice and vibrant and fit their respective elements without distracting from the gameplay itself. The blocks especially are well done. Coded in a combination of both color and design which makes it easy to see what exactly you’re dealing with in play, in the goal area and on the field at any given moment. The periodic shimmering of blocks on the play field is also a nice touch which adds to the polish.
I would have liked to see a more unified menu aesthetic, however. The pause menu especially is quite an eyesore of black text and red highlight on a dull white/gray field. I’m fairly certain the menus are also based off the XNA game state example. This is fine, but they don’t expand on it and use its power to an advantage for animation which would have made things feel better.
The sound effects are nice and fitting. Your standards of block rotation, movement, and destruction. I would give the music a miss though, and bring your own if you can. It’s serviceable, but varied wildly based on the stage (which itself is based on element type), and got annoying after repeated loops.
Summary
If you’re desperately in need of a new falling block game, you can’t really go wrong with Acupwnture by FourthDimensonal Gaming for 80 MS Blockgamebuyers. While it is a solid offering, you probably won’t play it for long. It just doesn’t have the addictive staying power of a Lumines or Chime.
Seriously, though, can’t we move past this “pwn” thing already?