N-Philes

Pogo Island

Posted April 23rd 2007 by Matthew Warren.

I'm always on the lookout for games that I can play for 15 or 20 minutes while I ride the bus from my apartment to campus and vice versa, and so I tend to shy away from the epic, multi-hour RPGs and other games of that ilk. Pogo Island, for the Nintendo DS, immediately caught my attention for this very reason. It's a collection of games from the ever-popular (but previously unbeknownst to me) website Pogo.com, where gamers can play any of their dozens of games and win tokens to enter in prize drawings. Their games are simple, colorful, and almost always derivative of older classic games - a recipe for success when translated to the DS.

Your hard-earned $30 nets you five games: Word Whomp, Poppit, Squelchies, Tri-Peaks Solitaire, and Philinx. Five is a disappointingly small number of games for $30, but it's easy to imagine Pogo Island heading to the bargain bin in the near future. Word Whomp is extremely reminiscent of Boggle, in that you must create words out of a scrambled mess of letters. Poppit is a rather dull game consisting of popping groups of same-colored balloons. When a balloon is popped, another will float up to take its place, and so part of the strategy is figuring out which balloons to pop to set up a combo for next time. Squelchies features sea life in a game where you bring down a Squelchy from the grid on the top screen and release it in an attempt to line up as many of the same color as possible. Tri-Peaks Solitaire is almost exactly like the multitude of clones on PCs everwhere, and is the only game among the five to feature any sort of replayability or semblance of fun. Finally, there's Philinx, which is a Bust-a-Move ripoff that's almost insulting in its overtness and so slow that there's no way you'll have any of the fun you might have had with Bust-a-Move. Outside of Tri-Peaks Solitaire, these games don't offer much in the way of enjoyment. Once you get the hang of the games, they're more of an exercise in tedium than anything else. There are also tiny mini-games spread over a board game, ala Mario Party, but these seem overwhelmingly tacked-on and an excuse to artificially inflate the game's replayability and difficulty more than anything.

Graphically, the game is pretty poor. There's slowdown, for one, especially in Philinx, the microgames and on the main board - and slowdown should pretty much never be a problem in a puzzle game like this one. Everything feels unpolished as well - there are some glitches and poot collision detection in the microgames, and like the slowdown, neither of these should really be an issue in a game as simplistic as Pogo Island. A couple more weeks in development could have done this game a lot of good. The sound is completely unremarkable - the background music loops entirely too much, and the sound effects are overly reminiscent of a childrens' cartoon show. I often muted the game because the silence was so much more appealing.

The problem isn't that Pogo Island is a bad game, it's that Pogo Island is just not a good one. It feels unrefined and unfinished, and once you've completed the few challenges the game offers you in the form of scoring a certain number of points or popping a certain number of balloons at once, there's really nothing more there. Despite the implications offered by the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection logo on the box, you cannot play any game except Word Whomp wirelessly with others, and multiplayer is accomplished only by passing the unit back and forth. You can, however, upload tokens earned during the game to your Pogo.com account to use online, which is a rather nifty touch and the only redeeming quality the game really has. Besides that, there's really nothing there to hold your interest.

Slight Pulse - Pogo Island is dying in the water.

Maybe if Pogo Island had double the games, fully-featured wireless play between DS's, and a lot of polish, it'd be worth a look. As it stands now, though, $30 is way, way too much to pay for five games that you can play for free on any number of websites and a handful of minigames that are about as entertaining as digging a well. It's good for a couple minutes of entertainment while waiting for a bus or between classes, and the idea of uploading tokens to your online Pogo.com account, but if you're looking for anything more than that you should search elsewhere.

Posted in: Reviews

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