by: Angela Proto

August 25, 2009

Everyone in the world knows this feeling: you have an assignment or task that you know needs to get done but you just can't bring yourself to do it. As time starts to run out, the knot of dread in your stomach grows larger and larger, until you start thinking things like "Maybe time will slow down and the due date will never come and I'll never have to do it in the first place."

This is how I felt about playing Droplitz. Before I played the game, I was beyond entertained with it's tamed feminine Zero Puncutation-esque online tutorial video. I was pumped and ready to play! Forty minutes of play later, any sensation of excitement vanished in smoke. Each time I turned on my Xbox and saw Droplitz waiting for me, I got that same knot in my stomach: "Maybe, just maybe, I won't ever have to play it again."

Droplitz is a puzzle game that consists of pipes dripping out little drops, and it is your job to spin pieces on the board and connect the pipes so that the drops make it to the tanks at the bottom of the screen. The trick is that you have only a limited number of drops that drip out, and with the branching of the pipes, you cannot possibly save them all. This means you have to play risk and reward with your pipe-arranging decisions. This also means that if you like to be a perfectionist in puzzle games, be prepared to be boiling with anger. Once you create a complete path from the top dropper to a bottom tank, a purple drop is sent out. When this purple drop makes it into the tank, the path disappears, awards you points, and allows new tiles to appear. Then you repeat the process.

The game has a few different modes, including basic level to level progression for clearing levels and earning points and basic survive-as-long-as-you-can-and-get-a-high-score. There really isn't any surprise to the kind of gameplay Droplitz has to offer, and its shallow range of gameplay feels better suited for a cell phone game or as a kill-time-at-work game. Luckily, Droplitz is also available for Windows and the iPhone. The real slap in the face to Xbox users is the fact that Atlus offered the game for $0.99 on sale for the iPhone and $2 on sale for PC. That doesn't add much incentive to have Xbox Live users download it for its full Marketplace price of $10.

Even if you did want to spend $10 on a game that is not nearly worth $10, you would then need to justify that purchase even further based on the game's visuals and audio. Although there are a number of boards to play on, they are only differentiated by colors and few graphics (a stark difference compared to Lumines Live and the different boards in that game). It feels that regardless of the variety of boards, you barely even notice the change while you are playing. The music is just as underwhelming. While seemingly intending to create a mellow, ambient musical experience, the soundtrack of the game comes off as boring and annoying. It is not upbeat enough to make the player feel energetic as they spin and spin and spin tiles for eternity, but it also isn't relaxing enough to combat the frustration of knowing that you will be losing drops no matter what. Though there may be few out there who can share this same comparison, the pairing of unintentionally frustrating gameplay and ambient music reminded me of my painful experience playing Creatures 2 on PC.

If I recommended buying Droplitz for Xbox Live Arcade, I would probably burn in Dante's eighth circle of hell for fraud.

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If you want to play this game, buy it on iPhone or PC. Under no circumstance spend $10 on Xbox Live Arcade.

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