A fun, frantic and addictive game for puzzle enthusiasts and completist gamers alike.
The Single Player game includes an Endless Mode and an Adventure Mode. Endless Mode gives you a puzzle board where Pokemon just keep coming faster and faster until eventually you aren't able to keep up with them anymore.
In Adventure Mode, the story is based around secret agent Lucy Fleetfoot. Lucy is an SOL agent, protecting Pokemon from the Phobos Battalion. Her job is to infiltrate the secret warehouses owned by the Phobos Battalion and recover all the stolen Pokemon.
The gameplay is fairly simple. In a Tetris-like puzzle area where pieces fall from the top, you must use the stylus to slide the little Pokemon up, down and sideways to line up four of the same kind. This is called "trozei". When you first trozei four identical Pokemon, the background turns green indicating a Trozei Chance. The Trozei Chance is a short time frame during which you can group Pokemon together in goups of three, and if you succeed, you can then pair them up. You can keep on sliding Pokemon during the chance period to create several chain reactions. The longer the chain, the more points you get. If you succeed in clearing the entire board (Trozei All) you get 10,000 bonus points.
Things get tricky since the Pokemon on the puzzle board move as if the board was continuous. Slide a row to the right or left, the Pokemon on the end of it will appear on the opposite side of the board. Slide a column to the bottom, the Pokemon will fall from the top. You can also slide Pokemon up, but only one space.
Although the mechanics are fairly simple to grasp, clearing the boards isn't. As you proceed from warehouse to warehouse, things will get faster and more complicated, and you will need to Trozei more and more Pokemon to clear the board. It's hard to plan chain reactions ahead, because you can't touch the top part of the screen, so being lucky is as much of a factor as being skilled.
Each puzzle stage has a set goal of Pokemon to be "trozei'd", but there is also a goal in points. If you reach that number of points, you are awarded a Coin.
As you clear certain boards, more warehouses will be unlocked and the Phobos hunchmen will reveal themselves. The Phobos Batallion has a few tricks up ther sleeves to make your trozei'ing job more difficult. They will throw round stones that can only be matched with a pink "wildcard" Pokemon, they will cause heavy rains of Pokemon to come down, and they will even turn out the lights and make your Pokemon look like a bunch of silhouettes (now that's disorienting). The trick to beat them is to constantly trozei your Pokemon, which keeps them stunned.
Aside from the several storage areas and mini-bosses, there is also a series of labs that are used as tutorials. Completing the tutorials also gives you Coins. Coins can then be used in a special area of the map where you can redeem one for two minutes of play time in a wider puzzle board, for a chance to trozei rare Pokemon.
Every Pokemon you manage to trozei will appear in the completion list. There are roughly 400 of them, and the rare ones are difficult to match since they disappear from the screen after a short period of time. They will flash, and by the time you notice them, they're gone.
The game also offers two multiplayer modes, Battle and Pair. Battle is a versus match, while Pair is a co-op game.
Graphically, Pokemon Trozei has an interesting style of artwork. In Adventure Mode, there are little "cutscenes" where you meet the Phobos henchmen, and it's done with a mix of still frames and moving backgrounds.
The music is fast-paced and appropriate for a puzzle game. Some of the tunes are more pleasant than others, but they all reflect the urgency of the shape-matching, especially when your Pokemon reach the top of the board (that one is especially annoying though, turning into what sounds like a series of squeeks). Although the background music will change from puzzle to puzzle or from time to time in Endless Mode, it would have been nice to be able to pick the music we want to play at any given time.
There aren't many game modes available and the Adventure Mode can be completed fairly quick, but the sheer amount of Pokemon to collect keeps me going back for more until my stylus is nearly leaving smoke trails from moving that quick. The bottom line is that Pokemon Trozei is a fun, frantic and addictive game for puzzle enthusiasts and completist gamers alike.
Review text part of Grrlgamer.com. Ful ltext and screenshots at:
http://www.grrlgamer.com/review.php?g=pokemontrozei