AstroPop Deluxe Reviews

A fun game from my childhood! It does hold the story of all time. Joking aside its fine but gets a little weird and frustrating.

A solid puzzle game using bricks and colors! (Played using a fix to get the game running and working on Windows 11) AstroPop Deluxe is a brick based puzzle-game developed by PopCap. It follows 4 different space pilots as they crush same-colored bricks with a variety of different brick types, and devastating super weapons. It's a simple gameplay loop that gets it's mileage with addicting gameplay thanks to it's simplicity. Gameplay of AstroPop first starts with choosing a Pilot Character, while you only have 2 at the start, you'll be able to unlock them as you play through the campaigns. Character selection boils down to what type of Super Weapon you'll be use once it's meter is full, otherwise they all play the same. The goal of each level is to pop enough colored bricks to power your meter to blast off to the next level. As the name suggest these bricks are color coded, and break when 4 or more come in contact with each other. You make these matches by moving the colors between each other by columns, making it very strategic compared to other puzzle games of the "match" style. There's also special bricks that spawn as a round progress, ranging from making a specific color explosive, clearing a line either vertically or horizontally or ones like the stone and metal bricks that only serve to block your matches, requiring one or more nearby matches to break. As well as the Virus block which will start infecting other bricks into other Virus blocks until all of them are defeated. As mentioned you also have super weapon that charges on it's own and can be activated on a whim, allowing you to gain a significant edge if the current round you have is going poorly. Every handful of levels you can get story cutscenes, save points, and bonus levels that provide a brick puzzle to get the maximum amount of bonus points. Overall, AstroPop Deluxe is a fun little puzzle game. It certainly stand out from other match puzzles games you see all over the mobile app store and has a fun theming and artstyle to boot. It's somewhat lengthy if you try to complete all the characters campaigns but it's mostly more of the same between the 4 characters outside of their super weapons. Really this game needed a sequel like with what Bejeweled and Zuma got to really expand on this base idea with new gamemodes, pilots, or just other things to give more variety. But as a whole, other than the whole needing to fix the game to make saving work on modern hardware, it's a pretty swell purchase! Even more so on sale cause it shrinks down to just 1$!