RoboCrush

RoboCrush is an excellent Bust-A-Move-style game from Freeform Interactive, the now-defunct company behind the popular Ingava.com freeware site. You play RoboCrush 5000, a cute anime-style robot whose goals is to vault colorful creatures called "Bleeps" up to the sky with your hammer. Once you've matched three same-color Bleeps, they will fall from the sky, making room for more Bleeps at the top. This is basically Tetris, except that instead of pieces falling down from the top of the screen, you throw them up from the bottom. Clear enough Bleeps and you will be taken to a new level where things happen at a much faster pace. As in other good Tetris clones, there are several twists in RoboCrush that makes it more interesting and challenging. In addition to colored Bleeps, you have to deal with gray Bleeps, which are special in that they cannot be matched with other gray Bleeps: you have to wait a while until they change into normal colored Bleeps which can be matched and cleared. Since this is not a normal Tetris game where the game is over once there is no more empty room for new tiles to occupy, RoboCrush has a different way of telling you when the game is over: the laser near the bottom half of the screen moves up a little each time a Bleep is launched, and down when you clear 3 Bleeps. When it moves over the last row of bleeps, the game is over. At higher levels, the laser moves up faster, thus requiring you to be quicker with your hammer.

With ten levels, six colors of Bleeps, attractive SVGA graphics, and cute sound effects, RoboCrush will keep Tetris fans hooked for quite a while before the next best thing comes along. Two thumbs up, way up!

Review By HOTUD