First off, it does have multiplayer ad-hoc. This is great and from what I read, it works great. Second, it has two player head to head on one PSP. Instead of trading it back and forth, one person uses the directional pad and the other uses the four major buttons. Awesome! The single player gameplay is nice. If you can get past the childlike anime style story, the game gets increasingly hard and just into the 6th stage, I'm having serious difficulties.
Playability / Controls
The learning curve on this game is short. Especially if you've played any games in the series prior to this one. Single player mode has you just using the directional pad to pull the clumps of Puyo down into play and moving them back and forth across the playing field. Other than that, you use the X and O buttons to rotate the Puyo clumps. It's a lot like Tetris, but even more like Lumines. If you've played those, you'll be fine here. Probably the biggest difference is navigating around using the O button to select instead of the X button like you're used to.
The controls do change if you decided to play the "head to head" mode with someone. At this point you will use different controls depending on which side of the PSP you are holding. On the Button side, you use the O key to pull the Puyo down, the square and are trigger buttons to rotate the Puyo and the X and arrow buttons to move the Puyo back forth across the playing area. On the direction pad side, you use the arrow pad in the same manner with the L trigger button as the other Puyo rotater.
It's really not as complicated as it sounds and the cool thing is that you get a screen that pops up next to yours to show your opponent's activities. Sweet! The whole idea when playing someone else is to get chains (multiple matchups) so that you can drop annoying Puyo on the opponent playing field.
Modes
• Sungle Puyo POP - There are 3 courses (one of which is training really) to go through and then a "Free Battle" option where you can match up against any of the AI players you want.
• Double Puyo POP - Here is where you play head to head as I spoke of earlier, but you can play a variety of ways with different rules or even set up a match with your own rules.
• Puyo POP with Friends - Wireless LAN (Ad-Hoc) against others.
• Endless Puyo POP - A Single player mode with no apparent ending in sight where you just melt your brain playing forever.
Graphics
Nothing to write home about really. I mean the effects that happen when you get chains (multiple matches that fall into place) look nice. Other than that, it has 2D characters and really no animation to speak of. The colors are vibrant, however, and it's kinda cool to get hints by the expressions on the faces of the Puyos awaiting to be matched up with their falling counterparts.
Sound
If you love campy Japanese kiddie anime music, you are in luck my friend. Really, it's not quite as annoying as one would imagine. I hardly notice it when I'm in the "zone" knee deep in Puyo. We'll call it sufficient.
Overall
This is a fun puzzle game for every age out there. All in all, it's got the goods. For the $40 I paid, I'm content to say the least. I know I've been logging the hours on it over the past week and poor Coded Arms is gathering dust right now.
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