Game Reviews

Match-three puzzlers always used to be such dependably sensible games. Then Lumines came along and introduced pumping techno music and striking laser-show visuals to the mix, and poor old Tetris had to go for a lie down. Turba looks to add to this funky sub-genre with the twist of being able to add your own music into the mix.

Turba’s method of matching blocks is one of the simpler ones we’ve encountered - at least on the surface. While you have the ability to slide blocks of two up and down their row, it’s a useful option rather than an absolute necessity. The main mechanism involves left-clicking and dragging on three or more coloured blocks of the same colour, or clicking on them individually, and then right clicking to make them disappear.

This manual detonation means that you can set up enormous multi-coloured combos before pulling the trigger. Indeed, you’re actively encouraged to try and link matches in all four colours in order to get mega points.

That’s the easy bit. The main challenge comes in dealing with the threat of Beat Blocks – ticking bombs that count down with the beat of the music track (more on that in a bit). When they hit zero they turn surrounding blocks black, which makes them impossible to chain. It’s imperative that you link these Beat Blocks before they explode, although this can be annoyingly tough when you only have partial control over the orientation of the surrounding blocks.

There are also Silver Blocks that serve to double up your score multiplier when incorporated into combos.As mentioned, beat-matching plays a part in Turba – although it’s not as pronounced as the blurb would have you believe. The idea is that you detonate your combos in time to the music in order to receive a modest score boost, but in reality the general gameplay never seems to be quite keyed in with the music in same way as, say, Lumines manages.