The Digest: On a new twist of Pachinko mixed with a bit of Breakout this game offers a good variety and a few hours of arcade fun.

THE FACT SHEET

RELEASE DATE: July 26th, 2010
DEVELOPER: Frozax
Price: 240 Points
GENRE: Action & Adventure

PRODUCT OVERVIEW:
Spring Up Harmony takes the best of Breakout and Pachinko and spices it up with 2D physics. Launch balls on color-matching items to clear the 30 levels of the game and collect the ten rewards. Use motors, fans, mechanisms, hanging objects and gravity to your advantage to catch the falling objects. Challenge a friend in the multi-player mode, where both players are playing on the same screen.

PRODUCT FEATURES:

• 10 Rewards
• 30 Levels
• Multiplayer
• High Scores

To be honest I had to look up what Pachinko was.  I knew it sounded familiar but couldn’t picture how the game was played.  Once I found out more about Pachinko and played Spring Up Harmony it made perfect sense.  Spring Up Harmony takes a lot from Pachinko and dabbles a little incredible machine and breakout throughout.  The object of the game is to the point:  Shoot your colored balls from your cannon and either through a direct hit or combo hits of the same color clear all the harmony pieces off the board.

Another facet to the game is scoring points.  The more combo hits you get the more points you get.  The longer your shot or if you bank shots off other pieces it scores more points.  Then to throw another loop you get even more points for catching all the pieces including bonus points for catching all the harmony pieces.  Each level has 7 harmony pieces one piece for each letter in the word harmony.  The harmony pieces are identified because they sparkle and sometimes it is a little difficult to tell the difference between the effects in the game and the sparkle of the harmony pieces.  But I found if you are playing on a high definition TV it was a little clearer.

Another factor in the game is time.  You only have a set amount of time to clear the harmony pieces.  To get more time added you have to clear more pieces.  But this is where I was a bit confused when playing.  I couldn’t tell how exactly you got more time.  Sometimes the counter would go to zero and allow me to keep playing.  But other times my time would run out.  It seems there was a bit of inconsistency with the time portion of the game.

There are also bonus pieces that would fall when you hit certain objects.  I couldn’t determine what the pattern was that actually caused the bonus pieces to fall.  It seemed that when you hit combos that they were more likely to fall.  But not only do bonus pieces fall but also dreaded red pieces that would cause negative effects to occur.  Some of these were inverted controls, loss of trajectory, and smaller basket.

The visuals in the game were above average to good.  I enjoyed the little effects that came off the pieces and enjoyed some of the fans, traps, windmills, and other obstacles that were put in your way.  The music score was ok.  For a game called Spring Up Harmony I expected a little more variety but it seemed like the music was a bit repetitive.

Some of the extra items in the game provide unique twist and barriers to clear you harmony pieces.  Some levels have blockers with colored buttons that can only be pushed by the same colored ball and when the button is pushed it clears out the blockers so you can get to your harmony levels.  Other levels have fans that will blow your pieces around and change the trajectory causing some havoc and providing more challenges.

Some of the level designs are just fantastic.  You have levels with obstacles, levels where the pieces will float like they are suspended in water, and levels where the pieces are held together on strings.  Some of the best levels are the higher levels and while they were not much more difficult they were a lot of fun to play.  I almost think that this game could have easily had 50+ levels and still had more to offer.

The one thing that had me conflicted was multiplayer.  In multiplayer both players use the same screen and are assigned two colors.  But instead of getting harmony pieces you just have to clear out your assigned colored pieces.  This was fun and enjoyable but there were only 5 levels that I could get to.  In fact I only got past 3 levels after I selected the random level option.  It would be nice if you could select what level you wanted to play in multiplayer since you could do this in single player action.  If the multiplayer had more levels I would love it.  In fact it would be great to incorporate some of the single player levels into multiplayer.

Conclusion: For 3 bucks this is an ok buy for me.  There are no difficulty settings so the game overall is fairly easy.  I went through all 30 levels in about 2 hours.  The multiplayer portion could have been so much better if they just would have included some more levels and gave you the option to choose your level.

Single Player: 3/5 | Multi-Player: 2/5

Special thanks to Frozax for providing us with a copy of the game for review.