Review: Puchi Puchi Virus
What the hell's a Puchirus? The virus has turned the "dull but kind" inhabitants of a "quaint planet much like Earth" into "wild, aptly named creatures." Fortunately, Doctor Keven A. Longfellow has developed the Puchi Buster DS, which cures patients with "high doses of pure awesome." It sounds like a game scenario an eight year old would come up with, but for that very reason, Puch Puchi Virus sort of rocks.
"Pure awesome" is where the gameplay comes in, but that is an overestimation. All you need to do is wipe out virii before they take over the screen by tapping like colors to form triangles and tapping one of them again to get rid of all three. If you let any virii hang out too long, they'll harden and become irremovable unless you first soften them up by catching them in the field of another triangle. Soft virii in a field are "locked" just like the ones you tapped to make the triangle, and by tapping more of the same color again you can form chains. The tutorial explains all this very well, plus the pill you earn and upgrade with each fifty virii you kill that automatically softens up some congealed virii.
If this sounds complex, it's not. Most levels just task you with getting a target number of points or virii destroyed. These are pretty easy. If things get rough you can just make the biggest triangle possible, which catches a handful of smaller triangles in the middle, killing a whole bunch in one shot. What does take some skill are the patients that need, for example, three chains of five. Unfortunately, just scooping up triangles within triangles doesn't count as a chain. You have to connect outside the original, which makes it harder to do, but mostly just difficult to keep track of. There might be six triangles on the screen, but only half of them giving you combos.
Once you save "Squirlolilocks" or "Octopache," whose appearances and character descriptions will make you groan ("Uwe G.T. Bull: Hobbies include gorging herself and making horrid film adaptations," hurr, what?), their boring human selves are restored. Is Puchi2Virus trying to make us think about the nature of a "normal" identity?? In any case, despite the pun-tastic monsters and multiplayer vs, the virus busting just didn't hold our attention as long as we would've hoped.
Cons: Kind of shallow, confusing combo counting
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