If you take the casual gaming experience from Harbor Master and the stunning visual effects from geoDefense and fuse them together, you get one addictive little game: geoSpark. The aim of the game is to eliminate “sparks” by combining like-ones. Just pairing up sparks isn’t what earns you the big points though, it’s creating long chains that does. Pressing and dragging a spark into like-ones chains them together and the chain only stops when you release your finger. This vastly increases your score, but like any game strategy, it comes with its disadvantages...

As you create chains a gravitational force grows around your finger and attracts other sparks towards it. This can create a real dilemma as to whether or not you should chain the next spark and if you aren’t careful they will be shooting all over the place before you know it! The danger here is that if two different sparks collide, it’s game over. To avoid this we found that you can simply quickly tap sparks to clear space on the screen, it’ll barely get you any points, but it gives you some time. In fact most of our failures were because we were being greedy and didn’t look carefully enough at the spark before chaining it.

Four special sparks are included in geoSpark to help you gain the most points possible: A 2x multiplier spark, a bomb that destroys every spark on the screen, a slow-mo spark and the rarest 1up spark that gives you a valuable life. Using these at the right times in the right way can give you a huge score boost and help you rise to the top of the leaderboard. Speaking of leaderboards, geoSpark has OpenFeint integrated so you can compare your score with the rest of the world. To give you even more incentive to up your scores there are achievements to earn too. To get a better idea of the gameplay take a look at the developer’s video below:

geoSpark is actually a collaboration between Imangi Studios and Critical Thought Games, the graphics side of things of course coming from the latter. The glowing vector style graphics really complement the gameplay with flares bursting everywhere as sparks are joined and destroyed. The faint grid background also lights up and ripples when you release a chain, creating a beautiful effect. The presentation is a wonderful part of the game and completes this admittedly casual game. It could be repetitive to some, but we found geoSpark to be astoundingly addictive and a fantastic on-the-go game due to its save state feature.

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geoDefense, B

Review by Ben Briggs, March 20, 2009

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