My Review of Collapse by Astraware

Well, this review should have been out last week, but I forgot to post it. Should have listened to my Palm when it told me to post. ;) Anyways, this is another review of an Astraware’s classic games for Palm. Collapse is a popular online game ported for the Palm OS and its fun game play, cool graphics, and great sound effects make it the perfect game for your PDA.

Game Play
Collapse’s game play reminds me a lot of Tetris, but you don’t remove blocks by making straight lines, you remove the blocks by groups. That means that when you have a group of three of more red blocks (they must be touching each other), you tap on one block in that group and poof- they are removed! If there are blocks above the ones that you removed, they fall down filling the empty space. More blocks come from the bottom of the screen and you will get a whole line of blocks added to your foundation. In the early stages, you don’t have to wait for the line to fill up completely with blocks, you can tap on it and the line will be added to the foundation. You must continue to remove the groups before your pile of blocks touches the top of the screen which means game over. You have three levels to choose from too: Easy, Average, Hard.

All this sounds quite easy but soon the foundation adding speeds up and more blocks keep coming and coming! You will them move in to what I call “frantic mode” tapping at anything that looks like a group. At least that is what I do! To help you out, you will sometimes see bombs and a coloring changing block. The black bombs will blow up any blocks surrounding it. The colored bombs blow up all those blocks of the same color as the bomb. I found that it is quite important to use these bombs in the higher levels as just tapping groups isn’t enough. The color changing block is rather annoying to me. It’s meant to help you make a group, but its not easy waiting for it to change to the correct color so you can make a group!

Graphics and Sound
The graphics of Collapse are sharp and cool. The whole game looks great on my Lifedrive. Collapse doesn’t allow me to remove my Lifedrive’s graffiti area. I know that other Astraware games have the same dilemma. I would like to see Collapse support hiding the graffiti area and allowing the user to play in full screen mode. It’s not a major issue to me, just a tweak I’d like to see. The sound effects of Collapse are great and lots of fun. They fit great in the game and don’t distract from the game play either. There is no background music which I don’t mind at all as the game size is smaller because of it.

Also it seems that myKbd/mySkin and/or Fontsmoother causes a little glitch with Collapse in the graffiti area. Whenever, I start Collapse, my graffiti area colors are a bit funky. This glitch goes away as soon as you exit the game, so it’s a minor issue I noticed and doesn’t affect game play or the graphics of Collapse.

Conclusion:
The game only takes up roughly 303 KB of your device’s memory. This means you are more likely to leave it on your handheld as it doesn’t require so much space. Collapse is the perfect game to play for 5 minutes or 30 minutes. Whatever free time you have Collapse will fit in nicely! Don’t forget when you post to a highscore board for the first time at Astraware, you earn 1000 club Astraware points. Right now I’m number 20 on the Collapse highscore list. Overall, I give Collapse 4 ½ out of five Palm Addict Palms.

Pros
Small size
Fantastic game play
Cool graphics

Cons:
Doesn’t support hiding the graffiti area
Using myKbd/myskin causes a graphic glitch in the graffiti area when playing Collapse