BeGhouled, a nice little play on Bejeweled is just what you would expect from this type of game, nothing more but just a little less than what could have made this a really good game. The graphics are good, nothing special though there are three tile sets for you to check out, cartoony Halloween, rendered Halloween and Clickomania colored blocks (for those that are easily scared of the other two sets).
For the few fans out there that don’t know about this type of game, match 3 as they are commonly referred to on most sites, you simply click a tile and move it up/down or left/right and try to line up 3 of them up so they disappear and the rest fall down (diagonally is not supported in this type of game, for something like that maybe you would enjoy Big Box of Blox).
You do get a total of 10 additional tiles added to the game to make your life that much harder (it was getting extremely difficult to pick out matches easily after getting a second tile added to the game’s core set). These additional tiles appear every 25,000 points, so by 250,000 points, you will have them all and probably dealing with a nightmare to win (maybe that is the point of the game).
Other graphics are sadly lacking. The one background I saw was devoid of animation, the bats just site there, they don’t move, the candle in the jack o lantern doesn’t flicker, the clouds in the sky in front of the moon don’t move. The tiles are devoid of animation too, no rotating of the candies, the ghosts don’t really fade away like you would expect ghosts to, the cat’s don’t meow or do anything really. The best way to describe the animation is like an early version of Shanghai in that they kind of just pop and are gone in a similar style.
Gameplay is controlled by an hourglass for your remaining time and a countdown meter that slowly gets shorter (making combos makes it disappear faster) that dictates when you are taken to the next level of the game.
Sound effects are barren too though you do get some kind of organ type music that you might find in a cheesy horror movie introduction. The sound effect when you make a match is definitely one that will make pre teens giggle as it is really not the sound you would expect, at least it doesn’t sound like it fits very well.
BeGhouled is a very competent rendition of Bejeweled with a Halloween theme applied, too bad the graphics and sound weren’t given as much care as the gameplay was as this could have been a lot better. Costing nothing, you should give it a shot, especially if you are too cheap/broke to buy Bejeweled at the extremely low price it is now. If you can play Bejeweled, you can play BeGhouled.
BeGhouled for PC Freeware
Developer: Sandor Fekete
Homepage: http://www.sandorfekete.com/
System Requirements: If your running XP, you can run BeGhouled
7 out of 10
