Supermagical Review
PROS
- Solid Bust a Move gameplay.
- Bright and humorous art and storyline.
- Limited store items on each visit allows you to clean out the shop.
CONS
- Nothing too new with the gameplay.
- Levels can keep extending if you aren't quick.
VERDICT
Classic Bust a Move gameplay turned on its side, with special recipes to complete, and other witches to collect along the way.
- Full Review
- App Store Info
The Bust-a-Move game type has been quite popular on mobile devices, with plenty of titles adding their own spin on things. Supermagical takes the concept, and twists it horizontally, turning it into kind of a Plants Vs. Zombies playing field, but with the ability to recruit extra characters to defend against the encroaching multicolored hordes. As Nina the little witch, can you convince your evil sisters to abandon the path of wrong doing, to bolster your own forces? Perhaps you can, with the chance to do a little spell casting along the way if you find the right ingredients.
If you've played this style of game on the iPhone before, you should be familiar with the control scheme. A drag with your finger moves the dial of your shot up and down, and then a release will fling the orb towards the enemy, bouncing off the walls if you've chosen to pull off a reflect shot. You need to hit a group with two or more of the same color to destroy them, and a bonus in this game is if you manage to separate the front lines from their anchor in the back, they'll lose morale, madly free and get struck down by lightning, leaving their coins and sweets to be tapped up by you.
You see, not every orb you're given will be the color you desire, but you can use your magic to change its color, provided you have the right kind of candy. These can be won and purchased, but for the most part, you'll have what you need to complete the level. Think of the color change as an extra boon in your bag of tricks. Every so often you'll run into one of your sisters, and will need to pass a series of dialogue choices to continue (with the wrong answer resulting in a small enemy clear before you are allowed to try again). Having only one right response makes these sequences feel very labored, and the only bright side is that afterwards you're rewarded with a new ally (like the magic soda fairy who can gobble up enemies with her carnivorous plants). Also there is a shop outside each level that only has a small amount of stock (except for the shops outside the mini-games), so you should always have enough to buy items to help you out in some way.
As you can see, there's a lot of content in Supermagical, and its cute and colorful presentation is sure to delight fans. The gameplay itself is rather standard fare, and levels can become frustrating when you're trying to get rid of a couple of stragglers, only to have reinforcements keep coming, turning what should have been a couple of minutes into five or ten. As these games go, this is a solid effort so the pros should definitely outweigh the cons for those that enjoy color busting action.
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