By no means an innovative idea, but is by far the most addictive and fun of the whole series once you give it a chance.
Now what separates Bejeweled Twist from the previous games, is easily a bold move that could have easily broken the game and sold it's fate. No longer do you swap two gems in an attempt to match three up, but rather rotate four gems in order to match three up. Sound familiar? It should. This is almost the exact same method Hexic. To even push this bold and at first glance, destructive move, is to remove the requirement to make a match before making a move. Needless to say I was very disappointed.
However, the game does manage to draw you in. With deep expositions, beautiful graphics, and a magnificent sound track (as to be expected with any Bejeweled game after Bejeweled 2), it was difficult not to at least use it as a way to blow time. This doesn't make it the instantly addictive success that Popcap lives and thrives off, but it does manage to save itself before it loses your attention, and that's good.
Once I sat down and started to notice patterns in the screen, I started to realize that I was actually being rewarded to maintaining chains of linked moves. This made me far less likely to want to make a non-matching move, and that's when things started to get interesting. With rotating four gems at once, this also opens the door for far more combination and ways to match things up. This coupled with the new bombs which tick down every move you make, only to present you with a Russian-roulette style 'live system', and gems that periodically lock up so they can't be moved... what you find yourself faced against is a game that manages to become extremely additive and shows off how exciting the game can be. Is the idea innovative? Absolutely not, but is it fun? Hell yeah.
However no good game can go without it's flaws, Twist is no different. You don't need to match up gems, but as long as you do make a match, the board will assure you that another match will always be present. It might not always be in your best interest to try to get that match in the higher levels, because you might have to destroy bombs or work around locked gems, but for lower levels where this is less of an interest, it tends to be really anti-climatic whenever you're on a Hyper-Speed Bonus roll, and suddenly you accidentally make a click that didn't connect. The game also suffers from a lack of any real new additional gameplay modes. Bejeweled Twist 2's action mode felt like it would have fit right in with Bejeweled Twist, but instead we were given a simple plan 5 minute time attack mode, which is fun in it's own right, but highly unoriginal and shouldn't have been included unless it was a package deal with another more innovative idea.
Zen mode is an interesting choice for fans of the original Bejeweled game who aren't interested in all the new bombs and pad-locked gems, doom gems, etc... but with the inability to lose at all, it's a bittersweet game mode because you never truly feel satisfied for earning a high score, since there's nothing to really stop you from doing so. Challenge mode in this game is the strongest of all the game-types (besides 'Classic' mode), simply because it shows how truly fun and addictive the game can be when you're faced up against objectives that are out of the ordinary. You may have to keep a certain number of a specific color on the screen, create and destroy a specific amount of flame or lightening gems within a time limit, and within 1 move. The list goes on, and every single once of them comes with up to 7 trials for you to test yourself on. It's highly addictive and follows the nature of the game very well.
All and all, Bejeweled Twist is by far my favorite of any of Popcaps games. I play it more then any other game I own, and I'm a firm believer that anyone who enjoys any casual gaming what so ever, if they truly give this game a chance... they will absolutely love it.