An extremely difficult Puyo Puyo puzzle game

User Rating: 6 | Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine GEN

Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is a Westernised version of the popular Japanese puzzle game Puyo Puyo. Other than featuring Dr Robotnik and his robots, there's nothing else to put this in the Sonic Universe; Sonic himself is nowhere to be seen. This means the game is really just a simple re-skin.

The game is very much like Columns or Dr Mario but includes a competitive element. The screen is split into two, one screen is your play-area and the other is your opponent. Pairs of beans fall from the top of the screen. As they fall, you can rotate the beans in order to make groups of four like-colored beans. At this point, they disappear and colourless beans are queued to drop to your opponent's screen. These colourless beans can only be destroyed when surrounding beans are removed. You lose when the beans reach the top of the screen, so it's vital to clear colourless beans as quickly as possible, and try and form combo's to attempt to defeat your opponent.

The basic mechanics are easy enough to grasp, but you'll need to work at a rapid pace and try and build up combos in order to defeat your opponents, because the computer difficulty is set extremely high. It took me a long time to defeat the second opponent, so a lot of patience is required.

Since you can see what your opponent is doing, you can learn strategies from them. I noticed one opponent was quickly stacking beans at the left and rightmost columns before placing beans between them. This gave him a smaller playing area to work with, but maximised the potential for combos.

There are three different gameplay modes: scenario, two-player versus, and exercise mode. The scenario mode is a series of 13 levels, taking on a bad guy one at a time. The Versus mode is a multiplayer mode, and the Exercise mode is a practice mode.

If you like this type of puzzle game, then you probably know if it's a game that you'd like to play. I'd only recommend it to puzzle experts though due to the high difficulty from the start.