Review: Chains

Chains is a match three style game where you make ‘chains’ (Hah! See what they did there?) with various little coloured bubbles. As is traditional you need to line up three bubbles of the same colour and pop them, but the two things that make it stand out are what most  of the plenty saturated “match three” market miss: physics and variety.

The physics implementation is simple; as opposed to there being a grid for the bubbles to fall into and lock into place  everything can just go wherever it falls, and it makes you wonder why it’s not a more common feature. It’s so much harder to predict what’s going to happen when the bubbles tumble down with gravity and roll over each other, thus adding some much needed spontaneity and urgency to what would normally be a very dull and predictable game.

The variety in the levels go a long way to separate it from the heard too. You could be asked to “Chain x amount”, or “Match exactly this amount in one go” while working with the structure of the level. These are made slightly more difficult with time limits, being told you can’t let x amount of bubbles fall or only being allowed a certain amount of chains.

And when the rules of the levels are combined with physics too, it makes everything much more interesting. Chains includes ideas like gate systems that will swing open letting precious bubbles go loose if too much pressure is put on them; or bubbles dropping into two separate sides of a see-saw, meaning that you have to work to keep the two even. These objectives continually change through the twenty levels, including others like keeping a flow of bubbles going down their own bottlenecked, bubbley river; to levels where bubbles are attracted to each other and clump in the middle of the screen, to ones where an artillery system is created by throwing them across the screen in a bucket.

Generally, Chains is something to be enjoyed as a quick break between games. It wouldn’t be anything worth taking a look at if it only had physics, or just had the level variety – but the combination of these turn what could’ve been another meagre and dull match three game into one which is very enjoyable, especially when the full thing is available for less than a fiver from the official site.

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