Bejeweled 3

I've got a somewhat addictive personality. I like to collect stuff, organise them, and I tend to get a bit obsessive about it. One such obsession was Bejeweled 2 + Blitz for iPhone. After about a month of excessive play, I had to gather all of my will to kick the addiction (I probably clocked in close 100 hours in total). Blitz was a superbly designed piece of puzzle gaming and it was incredibly addictive. One minute was all it took, and you always felt like there was time for another go.

As you can imagine I log on to Bejeweled 3 with mixed emotions as I'm greeted by the booming (and scary sounding) Bejeweled voice. I'm surprised to see a total of 8 game modes (4 are unlockable), how much can you do with the same basic puzzle principle of matching three or more gems in lines? The answer is butterflies, archeology, poker and pillars of ice...

I'm not going to go in the classic and zen (endless) modes here. You all know what they're about and to be frank I only played as far as I had to in order to unlock more game modes. Like I mentioned before I played a lot of action and blitz previously and I was naturally drawn towards Lightning. I can be described as an evolution of blitz where you blast certain blocks in order to prolong your sessions with 5 or 10 seconds. It's extremely addictive and compared to blitz it feels a bit more tactical, even if the entire screen blows up with exploding cascades from time to time. The fourth mode that is unlocked from the start is called quest and it tasks you with specific objectives in 40 mini-games. It's not really what I look for in a game of Bejeweled but it works well enough and adds a bit of variation.

Next up is poker. The aim is to create hands by blowing up specific colours. The lowest combination is a pair and the highest is a flush (five of the same colour). It adds a nice challenge of not just trying to blow up as many blocks as possible, but actually thinking several steps ahead in order to try and set up great hands.

Butterflies is also a new way to play Bejeweled. With every move the butterfly gems move up one row towards their death (a spider waits on top of the board), the goal is to blow the butterflies up or keep them down as long as possible. A great variation of Bejeweled that adds an element of urgency without a timer counting down.

The Diamond Mine is more traditional in that it uses a timer to keep your stress level up, but it also the most altered version of Bejeweled as you are excavating treasure at the bottom of the screen. It took me a while to get into this mode, but once I have grasped the basic principles I learned to like it. Perhaps not as much as I enjoy Butterflies, but nonetheless it's a nice addition to the ever growing family of Bejeweled game modes.

Finally there is Ice Storm. Pillars of water rise and turn to ice unless you blow up gems in their columns. It's stressful,but not as much straight forward fun as in Lightning. Collecting badges and setting high scores is enough of a motivation to keep playing.

That's it. Eight game modes. Most of them fun in their own way although Butterflies, Lightning and Diamond Mine are my favourites. I thought there really wasn't much more you could do with multi-coloured gems, but I was proven wrong. Bejeweled 3 is one of the most addictive and polished puzzle games you can play. At times it's almost too intense and explosive, but I love the balance PopCap strikes with modes like Butterflies that manages to keep your stress levels up, while still maintaining that meditative quality to made Bejeweled into what it is today.