Rainy Colors by Trifaces Studios, Price: $5.95
Reviewed November 2003

Pirate theme seems to be popular this year, from John Depp movie to Rainy Colors. Developed by Trifaces Studios, Rainy Colors is a puzzle game with a little pirate story and a unique game play. The graphics are jazzed up by polished packaging and bright colors. Playful sound effects are accompanied by a variety of music tracks. What’s the catch? If you are not good enough, you will get zapped by the lightning courtesy of your archenemies.

The gameplay in Rainy color won’t give you a déjà vu feeling that you have played this game somewhere else. Unlike games such as Bejeweled, you won’t need to slide gems to match the neighboring gems. What you will do is to combine two gems with primary colors (red, blue and yellow) and turn them into gems with secondary colors. When gems with both primary and secondary colors happen to line up in a group of three vertically, horizontally or in an L shape, they will explore. The explosion will not only get rid off these gems but also send thunder bolts to your opponents. When the lightning zapped most of the gems into white color and blocked other gems, the game is over.

There are two playing modes, one is story mode where you need to beat each guardians in the game to reach the bad mean boss at the end, and the other one is vs. mode where you can play against computer opponents or a friend. There are also three difficulty settings in the game as well. You control the game with stylus.

The graphics in Rainy Color give you the impression that the developers have put a lot of thoughts into creating a fun, colorful and coherent environment for this puzzle game. Each battle in the puzzle will take you to a different island where you will fight the guardian of that island. Each island has its own background image, and in vs. mode you can choose any of the backgrounds where in Story mode you must travel to every island in your tour de force. The gems move smoothly and change shapes from raindrops to square gems after they landed on your board. You will also enjoy little things like cow shedding tears after loosing, dragon breathing fire and other character animations.

The music tracks are very enjoyable and match the background theme in style. The Asian garden background is accompanied by slow orient music where the adventure island theme has a fast pace action music style. The sounds effects include a variety of small FX pieces assigned to players’ reaction to loosing, winning and wishing good luck, and thunders and lightning that play big part in the game. Rainy Colors supports Pocket PC with ARM/Xscale as well as MIPS processor, and takes about 4MB storage space.

Rainy Colors puts thinking back into the gem sliding puzzle games, and provides plenty of fun and challenge. While the colorful graphics will likely grab gamers attention, the nice little touches in the detail give this game character. Even though it might take you a little time to get used to spotting primary colors in a fast pace, the puzzle genre fans will be glad that they have paid a visit to the islands of rainy colors.

Playing Hints and Tips

Don’t wait for all the gems to settle on the board, start sliding as soon as there are matching gems available. Try to use the gems with primary colors on the bottom of the board first so that you don’t waste these moveable gems.

In the options, you can switch the playing field from left to right, and vice versa. Use the side that fits you better.