by Robert Gidley

Created on: January 09, 2009   Last Updated: January 12, 2009

At first glance, Spirits of Metropolis seems like yet another "Bejeweled" clone. But a few minutes into the tutorial it's clear that the developer, Vertigo Games, has actually managed to come up with a new type of strategy game.

The idea is to build chains of the same color starting with a shining white gem in the center. Colored gems are set down at random on the playing surface and gems of the same color extend the chain. Every third gem of the same color is a gem with an exclamation point that lets you start a new chain of a different color.

The way you change the gem colors is to click on it with your magic cursor, and the tricky bit is that the magic cursor uses a different color each time you click on a gem.

This seems complicated and confusing at first, and when you start playing Spirits of Metropolis, it is. Fortunately, there's a tutorial that walks you through the basic gameplay and gets you pointed in the right direction, although there's still plenty of additional gameplay surprises as you go along, such as locked colors and blocks that can't be changed.

It takes some practice to get the hang of it. Fortunately, you can play through the demo version's 15 levels as long as you want, so you don't have to worry about trying to figure it out in a hurry.

The basic Arcade mode is timed, giving you a fixed amount of time to build chains. But when you "explode" the chains (turn them into a score), you get additional time on the clock. This is handy when you've painted yourself into a corner with only a few unchained gems left, and it's going to take forever to turn them the right color.

If you run out the clock, the chains also explode, which means you might get additional time (five or ten seconds, typically). This can lead to the rather silly situation of playing several very short rounds in a row as a few seconds are added to the clock, the clock runs down, but you've earned enough points for a few more seconds and so forth and so on (I once doubled my score on a series of these clock extensions, so it's not all bad).

A Puzzle mode challenges you to clear the board within a fixed number of moves, which tests your understanding of how the game works. This mode is mercifully untimed, so you can scratch your head for as long as it takes to figure it out.

If you like Bejeweled, or other color-matching games, you should give Spirits of Metropolis a try. But be prepared to take the time to get the hang of it; it's not quite like any other game.

Rating: 4/5

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