Dapple Review

People have begun to complain that there are too many entries in various game genres within App Store.  Too many poker apps, too many tower defense apps, too many match-3 apps… well, you get the idea.

But, you know, I’m not one of them.  I’m the type of person who doesn’t mind too much of a good thing.  I’ve never been at a party and said, you know what, there are just too many pretty girls here (I know that sounds sexist, but I think we all have the same reaction to things we like).  And I happen to be a guy who likes Match-3 games.  And I also know that if we told developers out there that we had too many of these games we’d miss out on a lot of fun.

The newest game in this category, Dapple, certainly fits the “adds fun” quota to the mix but it also adds a nice sense of originality in a field that I thought had been tapped completely dry.  I have to give it up to the developers (Streaming Colour Studios) just for that.

We know that basic formula.  You’ve got a lot of colored markers on the field and you need to move things around so that you’ve got three or more of a color together so that they can disappear and others can fall to place.  This type of game actually has a good deal of strategy to it and it’s fun to try and be a few moves ahead so that you can create chains and score big points.

Usually you match colors by “swapping” to colors that are next to each other, but this is where Dapple zigged when everyone else zagged.

In Dapple the colors are splotches of paint and you don’t swap places to get the colors into place, instead you have to mix paint colors.  You are shown a color on a paint brush and that’s the next color you will be adding to the board.  Now you have to think back to elementary school and remember what mixture of colors create other colors.  For instance, if you have four orange splotches with a red splotch in the middle you would use yellow on the red splotch to make it orange, thus giving you five orange splotches together.

This makes the game really fun because colors can make more than one color so you have some good options as to where you can paint.

You’ll also run into “brown” splotches that are a lot harder to get rid of, and bonus items that will make things a lot easier on you.

The game comes in three modes.  The first two are pretty basic as you have a “Classic” mode where you just play until you have no more turns left, and “Timed” where things are… timed.

But the third mode became a quick favorite of mine.  This is the “2 Player” mode where two people can play on the same device.  The screen is divided in half and as you make good chain reactions the line separating the field moves in your favor and your opponent has less to work with.  Eventually you control the whole field and win the game.  I actually found this mode fun to play by myself just switching sides.  I really liked the way that Dapple handled the two player game.

Dapple made sure to avoid the same mistake that almost every other game in this field made out of the box and put in a color blind mode.  That fact alone tells you that they’ve been paying attention to what the consumers have been talking about.

I guess my only complaint on the game is that I didn’t care for the background music.  The sound effects were very good, but I quickly found myself going to the option menu and bringing the music down.  But really, that’s pretty low on the “make or break” scale for me.

Dapple is a very fun game for fans of Match-3 games and well worth adding to your library of games to breakout when you’ve got some time to kill.  Just like women coming to a party… it doesn’t matter how many are all ready there, when a pretty girl walks in you’re glad she came.  Dapple is that pretty girl.

The Good

2 Player Game Is Very Fun
New Take On “Match-3″ Games
Color Blind Mode

The Bad

Background Music Is Weak

Related posts:

1. Memoria Review
2. Color Lines Review
3. Super Yum Yum 3

Tagged as: Color, iPhone, Paint, Puzzle games