Magical Drop 2

"These balloons wobble a lot...like my ex's"

Magical Drop 2 is a small, yet addictive puzzle, where your objective is to burst balloons. By moving a clown at the bottom of the screen, you can carry an infinite number of balloons and getting 3 or more to cluster together causes them to disappear and thus earn a lot of points. But this sounds a bit too easy, right...? True ! This is the basic objective in the game and it'll work in Puzzle Mode where you only objective is to make it past the various, fast-paced levels which don't give you any break.

However, in Versus Mode, this way of playing will only result in you suffering a quick, yet agonizing death. Pray note that the Versus Mode applies both to while playing against the CPU or human mutts. But first, you must choose your character from a limited but cute cast. These characters, which appear behind the ballons you need to burst, represent different things like ''The World'' -a damn hot chick-, or ''The Magician'' -one of the toughest CPU AI-.

In these modes, you need to chain rows such that by quickly moving forth and back, you'll be able to make different clusters explode to earn combos. Once a nice combo is obtained -3 to 6 is good, 10 and plus will send your opponent home crying as a wall suddenly comes and crushes them. So, quickness is your best ally here as well as abit of luck since the amount of combos you get out of luck -just because some balloons were wacky enough to hit a bonus- can be amazing.

Don't let the childish, flashy graphics fool you and don't ever let the neat balloons trap you with their innocent looks, Magical Drop 2 is a tough puzzler. At harder levels and even with a lot of practice and good knowledge about the game system, the 4 credits are barely enough to have you successfully beat the game, in either mode. Magical Drop 2 is a fast and furious game that will not even let you pause for a brief second as the number of balloons just keeps increasing, without showing any sympathy for your poor fingers.

This cute puzzler also has extremely well-drawn backgrounds which seem to have been lifted from comics. As a matter of fact, each background does represent its character's origin and the picture of the old tree is simply marvellous. The amount of details, whether you're stupid enough to be staring at your character or a background while your opponent is busy setting his balloons nicely for a major WHAM, is questionable for such an old game.

But hey, this just makes things even better and puzzlers that are interesting while having good graphics have become quite rare in a world where RPG and Survival Horror seems to be the most demanded genres. To deduce that Magical Drop 2 combines both solid gameplay and enjoyable visuals doesn't require Hercule Poirot's grey cells.

The music and sound effects fall short in places though as there is a blatant lack of variety. The couple of themes get downright annoying after a while and they're not even that good. Sure, they're decent but since there are only a few of those, one can't help but be bored, hearing the same thing over and over again.

The game is quite short too but I'll give you a trizillion dollars if you manage to beat it in one day EVEN AT THE DEFAULT LEVEL 4. And don't start imagining how the game is at level 8 or you may pee in your pants or whatever it is that's covering your ass right now. Thus, Magical Drop 2 manages to entertain for a few weeks and if like me, you are in love with puzzlers, you'll happily take it over and over again as you try to get the perfect match with a 15-hit combo.

With a nice concept brought forward by great graphics although it lacks in audio, Magical Drop 2 is one of the best puzzlers available on the Neo-Geo. But be warned that this game is insanely difficult although it starts quite easily and if you're a wimp who cannot stand a challenge, you won't like it. However, the rest -those who enjoy challenges and those who actually like the genre- have done well to drop here. Good luck getting it legally.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/28/02, Updated 11/09/02