Marble Drop

"Drop balls through labryinth puzzles. Sound exciting? It's not."

About ten years after the success of SimCity, Maxis has introduced its first puzzle game, Marble Drop. Against the backdrop of beautifully rendered Leonardo DaVinci sketches, the player (you) attempts to navigate colored marbles through a complicated series of ramps and elevators, hoping that the marble's final resting place will be in the correspondingly colored bin. Not as simple as it sounds. Every marble released radically alters the path of the marbles that follow. There are teleporters, buzzsaws, cannons, and crossbows that may shoot your marble, and ramps may vanish off the playfield or lead your marble into an infinite loop.

Sounds exciting, no? It's not.
Marble Drop may succeed as an interactive screen saver, but it fails to engage attention as a game. The only manner in which you participate in the game is by selecting which color marble to drop into one of a couple funnels; everything else is predetermined by the course. Basically, you must scan the entire labyrinth before opting for the blue marble in lieu of the red one, dropping it, and waiting to see what happens.

Points are awarded when marbles pass over, or through, point areas. Get enough points and you can ''buy'' replacement marbles for the ones you have lost. Or save up for the black marble - it mimics whichever color is needed to complete the level. There are fifty courses to choose from, ranging from the most basic introductory levels to the absolutely confounding invisible puzzle, and you are able to select the level from a user-friendly pull-down menu. Levels may also be approached linearly.

The graphics in Marble Drop are simple, yet effective pseudo 3-D. Every screen looks adequate, if QUITE simplistic. Really, they’re not too bad.

Occasional run-of-the-mill sound effects like ''Swoosh,'' ''Bang,'' and ''ZZZZZZ'' are about it in the audio department, with the exception of snippets of classical music every time a ball falls in the right bin.

Marble Drop has almost NO REPLAY VALUE because the puzzles are always the same. They don’t change every time you play through the game. Because of this, you won’t be coming back to this game much.

The Scores Rundown:

Graphics: 5/10

Sound: 6/10

Gameplay: 6/10

Replay Value: 2/10

Overall (not an average): 5/10

The Final Word:
While at first it may seem exciting, Marble Drop gets old VERY QUICKLY. Marble Drop may help your concentration, but what you'll really need is help staying awake with this boring game.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/09/01, Updated 11/09/01