Puyo Puyo Champions is a party match-4 puzzle game with which you’ll have a ton of fun! Read more about this great game in our Puyo Puyo Champions review!
Easy to learn, tough to master! Jump straight into fast-paced puzzle action with features fit for both friendly rivalries and competitive tournaments in Puyo Puyo Champions. Challenge your friends and family in local multiplayer or compete against players from around the world through online matchmaking. Built for all ages, this classic puzzle game comes with a surprisingly competitive edge.
Puyo Puyo Champions – Trailer
Puyo Puyo Champions is a match-4 puzzler in which you must plan how to place the different blobs that go down the playing area. This game is built using an interface similar to the excellent Puyo Puyo Tetris that released a couple of years ago on PlayStation 4, as well as on the Nintendo Switch.
As you start the game, which contains two different modes – a little about it later -, you’ll select if you are playing alone vs. CPUs, or with friends, either locally or by taking the fight online (which requires an active PS+ subscription for you to access it). Playing solo was okay for the most part, but the real fun of this game is when you’re playing in multiplayer with other friends, as it can get pretty hectic and hilarious!
The basic gameplay of the main mode (Puyo Puyo 2), as I mentioned, is matching four blobs of the same color to remove those blobs from the screen. Once you do this, the blobs that were above them will fall down, which you can use to create combos. As you clear blobs and successfully build combos, you’ll then send blank Puyo blobs to your adversary (be that a CPU player or friend/foe). The more combos you create, the more Puyos you’ll be able to send to the other player’s playing area, which becomes hilarious as literally half the screen of another player can be rained on with Puyos.
The second mode is called Puyo Puyo Fever, and the difference here is that when the blank Puyos that were sent from other players are cleared, it will gradually fill up a gauge in the center of the screen. Once this gauge is full, the player enters Fever Mode, which gives pre-built easy to do five combos in a row, which in turn will send a lot of blank Puyos to the other player. I loved this mode and this is the one I spent most of my time in, as it was very hilarious to play!
I do have one complaint about the game in general: there is no explanation on the gameplay, so you’ll have to figure it out by yourself. You’d have a fair point arguing that a match-4 puzzle doesn’t require any tutorials, but in the case of the Fever Mode, I spent an entire evening trying to figure out what was triggering the Fever Gauge to go up, since this is information that is not presented anywhere in the game.
As for the presentation of Puyo Puyo Champions, I do have to say it’s top-notch. The menus are great, the game is very fluid, and it runs at a solid 60 frames per second. The Puyo Puyo franchise is known to be a very colorful experienced, and this one does not disappoint. I loved selecting the background, the soundtrack, and even the actual Puyos for each game I played. Each game is also saved so it can be replayed in the Theater, which I thought was a nice touch.
Each game mode can also be played in Tournament in which you can determine the number of players that will take on this challenge, up to 8 in total. As for the trophies, there are a lot of different ones to unlock, for things such as performing 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 combo chains hundreds of times, completing a ton of Puyo League matches, enjoying many Free Play matches, and more. So if you want to get that Platinum trophy for your collection, you’re going to be playing this one for a while!
Final Thoughts
Puyo Puyo Champions is easy to recommend at its budget $10 price. If you’re looking for a puzzler to play in local or online multiplayer with quirky gameplay mechanics, then this is exactly what you need. There are only two modes available so if you’re looking for more game variety, and have a little extra money to spare, you could also buy Puyo Puyo Tetris, which features the same Puyo Puyo classic gameplay mixed in with Tetris, for a still very affordable $19.99.
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Cost:
$9.99 (PS4)
PSN Game size: 760MB
Disclaimer
This Puyo Puyo Champions review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by SEGA.
