Puzzle games are a perfect match for mobile gaming. Most of them utilize simple controls, and their pick-up-and-play design makes them ideal for those free minutes you have while waiting for the bus. Pac-Match! presents a simple set of rules that, in application, make for a challenging, difficult puzzle game. With 50 levels to choose from, there's plenty of puzzle action to keep you occupied.
Pac-Match! starts you off with a board filled with tiles in the shape of characters from the arcade classics Pac-Man and Dig-Dug or one of two different sets of colorful icons. There are five different sprites in each set. Play begins with as few as a dozen or as many as over a hundred of these tiles arranged in neat rows and columns on the board. If one of the characters or tiles above, below, to the left, or to the right matches a tile, you can select it. The tile disappears along with any matching neighbors and other tiles that form a chain with it. If you clicked on a Pac-Man tile, the Pac-Man tile above it, the Pac-Man tile to the left of that one, and so on would disappear from the board. You cannot select a piece that has no matching neighbors, and diagonals don't allow for a match. When a piece disappears, any pieces above it in its column drop down to fill the empty space. The game continues until you clear the board or there are no more matching pairs left. You score points based on the number of tiles you clear with a single selection. The larger the chain of characters you remove, the more points you score. You also score points for clearing a board in as few moves as possible.
At its core, Pac-Match! presents a simple game environment. The key to the game lies in the interaction between the rows and columns. As you remove pieces, the board shifts to accommodate the empty space you create. If you make a mistake, you might drop a piece into a position where it is impossible to eliminate it, since you can only remove a piece if it has a matching neighbor. Orphans, such as the last, single piece of a given type, make it impossible to complete a board. Thus, you must constantly plan three or more moves ahead in order to win the game.
The difficulty in clearing a board could prove frustrating, but luckily Pac-Match! takes that into consideration. The game has 50 levels, and you can choose to play any level you want. If you are stuck on a board, you can simply skip it to try out the later ones. You can also practice on easy, medium, and hard difficulty settings. You will have to clear an increasing number of tiles off the board as you move up in difficulty. The hard level has so many tiles that you might have to squint to make them out.
Pac-Match! has good graphics for a puzzle game. The tiles are easy to tell apart, since they all have distinctive colors. The graphics break down on the harder levels, however, because the tiles become so small that it is sometimes difficult to keep track of them all. The game lacks sound, but you won't miss it much while concentrating on how to solve a level.
Overall, Pac-Match! is an enjoyable puzzle game with a lot of replay value. By opening up all the levels, the designers give you plenty of challenges to tinker with while preventing a single, difficult level from dragging the game to a miserable, frustration-ridden halt.
