Publisher: Axela
Developer: Axela
Release Date: 10/30/1997
Date Played: 5/27/2020
Region: USA
Time Played: 22 minutes
What’d you think?: Just called Star Sweep in its original Japanese release, the American version is minimally translated with some prominent spelling errors, but the text is the least important part of any puzzle game. The puzzle gameplay was a little interesting. The playfield was Tetris-like, tall and narrow, where overfilling it spells doom, but pieces don’t drop from the top; you have the freedom to place them anywhere — but gravity is still in play. Speaking of the pieces, they seemed to come in 3 colors and one shape, also long and narrow, like Tetris‘s I piece. At either (or in rare and ostensibly powerful cases, both) end of the piece is a star. The goal is to get the stars to touch other stars of the same color, which causes the blocks to disappear and points to be scored. All the bonuses you might expect, like for cascading combos or getting more than two blocks to match at once seem to apply but I was pretty bad at setting that up.
There was a variety of gameplay modes and playing them unlocked a currency that would unlock a few more gameplay modes, as well as characters for the Vs. mode, which works like you’d expect.
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C6HEWSKjNU
