After years of persistent fan demands Android has finally caught the extreme Peggle fever.
There are few games out there that present beauty through simplicity quite like Peggle, where almost anyone can jump in and have as good of a time regardless of skill level.  Since the core idea of Peggle is just to fire a limited supply of balls down the screen and try to hit red pegs the skill required to be successful is a simple skill to learn: Just anticipate the direction the ball will bounce after hitting a peg or two. There is a thing or two to learn along the way, such as the special powers of the different selectable characters and when to use them but for the most part you’ll want to just sit back and enjoy the therapeutic Peggle ride.
While the gameplay and the basic goal remains the same throughout the fifty odd levels in the main adventure it’s surprising how varied the levels seem by introducing new characters and moving around some pegs. You’ll start with a simple field filled with blue pegs and a few red, once the red pegs are gone the level is over. By the end of the adventure you’ll be hitting purple pegs for score bonuses, timing your shots to avoid obstacles, flying through portals and making use of the powers of the ten characters. Some of the powers you’ll experience are things like multiball, pinball like flippers and fireballs which can be incredibly useful in the right situation which is why having the adventure mode provides the perfect training for the tricky challenges that come up afterwards. Challenges mostly focus around beating fixed score goals where as others have you competing with the AI to set the high score. These challenge levels are both tricky and plentiful, to beat all of them will take a lot of time, a handful of skill and a fistful of luck.
Any of the levels can be played versus a human or an AI opponent using any of the unlocked maps or characters but it’s unfortunate that the multiplayer mode only supports hotseat (hotphone?) play, so you’ll be passing the phone between turns rather than playing online. It would have been nice to see some form of online play or even score comparisons like we’ve seen with so many other Android titles, but this seems unlikely to change.
There’s something euphoric about the way that Peggle comes together both visually and audibly. The tranquil music and the ding of the pegs as the board lights up drives you to play on. Once you approach the final red peg on the board the drum roll starts and everything slows down and zooms in, if you should hit it, rainbows fly out and Ode to Joy begins gleefully playing as your ball continues to bounce until it hits one of the score buckets at the bottom of the screen. The clean graphics don’t look quite so clean with a tablet however as the seams of some of the art start to show.
Peggle is just about the perfect pick up and play game and provided you don’t already own it for one of the many other platforms it’s appeared on over the last four years then you’ll find that this is something a little bit different that just about anyone can enjoy.
