Acid Drop

"A very crummy puzzle game"

Despite its funny title, Acid Drop is a deeply flawed game that fails to entertain.

At its core, Acid Drop seems very closely related to the future puzzle game Columns. You can skip this paragraph is you know how Columns works. If not, it is a fairly simple game. Three pieces will fall together in a vertical column (hence the name) until they hit something on the ground, in a style very similar to Tetris. Each piece has a different color, and your goal is to line three pieces. When you do so, they disappear. You control the falling pieces by moving them horizontally, and you can also use the fire button to change the order of the three pieces dropping.

Acid Drop features a couple fundamental changes that will both surprise and displease Columns fans. First, one cannot score combos. To illustrate, imagine you complete a vertical line with two of the three falling pieces. They disappear, and the third piece drops. Now imagine the third piece drops in such a manner that three in a row are aligned. They will not disappear. They will sit there in an aligned fashion, making you wonder if this is some sort of gameplay feature or an oversight in programming.

Under this system, one would expect the playing field to gradually fill up and eventually overflow. The second fundamental change prevents that. A vertical bar will eventually appear when you score enough points, and everything under it will disappear. When that happens, your level increases and the pieces start falling slightly faster.

If the only problems with Acid Drop were faulty gameplay mechanics, then it still might be a decent game. But Acid Drop manages to go horribly wrong almost everywhere else.

The game's sound consists of nothing more than the quickly repeating background music. Despite the primitive nature of the Atari 2600's sound chip, which probably shouldn't be playing music at all, this song manages to be the most painful butchering of a classical masterpiece that you are likely to ever hear. Do not play Acid Drop with the volume on unless you like torturing yourself.

One may also be surprised, considering how simple the 2600's graphics are, that a programmer could screw them up. Acid Drop carries this achievement as well. Unlike Columns, which differentiates pieces by patterns, Acid Drop is limited by the hardware and must use a different solid color for each piece. Not only are the colors about the most hideous choices possible, some of them look similar enough that one might confuse them in dropping pieces. A green piece would be nice, instead of two shades of purple. Or maybe a red piece, instead of two shades of blue. How about a white piece instead instead of two ugly yellowish brown things?

To put it simply, Acid Drop is a bad game. Tetris and Columns are only two of many related puzzle games that are vastly superior.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 05/29/01, Updated 05/29/01