Previous Next

Gentle folk of the internet, it is with great sorrow that I bring you dark tidings. Another bastion of hope and light has fallen to the ponderous, unstoppable onslaught that is the empire of Match-Three! The 8-bit Atari nation put up a good fight to fend it off for this long, but ultimately their efforts were for naught. Flee! Flee now, lest you be engulfed by it! Doom is upon us all!!

Ahem - sorry about that. Don't know what on earth came over me there. Being serious for just a second - difficult under the circumstances, but I'll try anyway - there are undoubtedly some truly vile match-'em-up games out there and because of this, the genre does have a certain amount of bad press. This sometimes obscures the fact that these games can actually be good mindless fun... if they're done well. That's a bloody big "if" sitting right there, I can tell you.

So, let's fire up the heavy-duty spotlight and see what we've got here. Swapz was created by prolific developer Fandal with some help from his associates, PG and Raster. It was made for the 51st edition of the Czech magazine Flop, and as you must have guessed by now, it's the first match 3 game to be made available for the 8-bit Atari (XL/XE). If nothing else, Fandal has claimed a note in history for this achievement, but here at RGCD we don't let things like that affect our objectivity! Gosh no. You, the player, only want to know whether a game is worth the effort of playing... and sadly, in this particular case I would have to say it isn't.

To quote the ever-eloquent Ed when he referred the game to me, the bottom line about Swapz is that, in the match three universe, "it's one of the crap 'game-over-when-there-are-no-more-moves' variety. Arrrggghh!" There's no choice of game modes, no 4- or 5-match powerups, no flashy special effects... not even a cheesy storyline to laugh at.

From a technical standpoint, I can't fault the general presentation and "build quality"; Fandal is an experienced Atari coder and it shows. But otherwise there just isn't a whole lot to lavish praise upon. Graphics are reasonably detailed and the individual types of puzzle pieces are easy enough to identify, but the play area becomes quite bland with only two colours for the blocks. There's some music in a couple of places which is fine, and the sound effects are also fine. Oh, and there's a high score board in there too. All fine there, then. Um...

Yeah. I'm running out of useful stuff to say, really. There's nothing horrendously bad about the game, but there's nothing wonderful about it either. If you're undecided, you really won't be missing much if you choose to give this one a miss.