iLounge

Company: Gameloft

Website: www.Gameloft.com

Title: Diamond Twister

Players: One

Price: $5

Compatible: iPod touch, iPhone, iPhone 3G

Gameloft S.A. Diamond Twister

By Jeremy Horwitz

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge
Published: Friday, July 25, 2008
Category: Games - iPad, iPhone + iPod

On July 25, 2008, iLounge published iPhone Gems: Action Puzzlers, Table + Pinball Games, a feature article looking at eight assorted games developed for the iPhone OS. This review focuses on only one title from the collection; you can read the full article, with screenshots of all of the games together, through the link above.

On the iPod, Gameloft built a reputation for releasing titles that were flashier versions of other companies’ classic and not-so-classic games. Diamond Twister ($5) is, in essence, the three-or-more gem-matching game Bejeweled mildly recast as a jewel heist adventure.

The word adventure might be a little too kind, as Diamond Twister does little more than provide short stages that use dollars, time limits, and changing board sizes to keep the Bejeweled-alike gameplay semi-interesting from level to level, interrupting every once in a while for a “mission” story that doesn’t affect anything but the background art.

While this approach is fairly shallow, Bejeweled was even less deep, and thus there’s more variation here than in PopCap’s official iPhone title Bejeweled 2; Diamond Twister also sells for half the price. On the flip side, Bejeweled 2 has superior visual effects, both in and in-between levels, and its new Power Gems break up the gameplay much as Diamond Twister’s more powerful reward gems do, making a number of gems disappear simultaneously. Pricing is the only reason we’d give Diamond Twister a small edge here; both of these games are fine time-wasters but not spectacular.