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Dropcast is a cute little puzzle game THQ saw fit to send my way. The premise is fairly similar to Puzzle Planet League, but with an emphasis on competition. Touch blocks on the touchscreen to make groups of two or more of the same color disappear. If you touch a group of six or more, then you cast a spell on your opponent with some sort of deleterious effect. The bigger the group of blocks, the more potent the spell.

Generally, each of the eight characters you can use has a selection of four spells, each keyed to a different color block. One of those spells is always a counterspell, always triggered by the blocks with dashes in the middle. Gameplay is basically a risk-reward dealie where you want to build up enough blocks onscreen to get big combo spells out, but don't want your blocks to build up so much they exceed the top of the screen. Keeping track of this and what your opponent is doing (displayed on the other screen) is actually pretty hard.

In theory, every character has their own selection of personal spells. In practice, most characters feel pretty interchangeable, with the exception of a few who have completely awful spells. There are at least two characters who appear to have spells that eliminate blocks on the enemy's board, which might disrupt a combo but is more likely to help them survive longer if they're in trouble. Each character also has a characteristic super move you get to trigger by doing combos involving really huge numbers of blocks. Once again, they all do basically the same thing - cover up the screen so your opponent can't see much, load the screen with garbage blocks, or both - but some are lousier than others in practice.

You'll probably pick your favorite based on their designs, which are all really very charming. Dropcast uses the cute grotesque sort of style that I associated with Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, and that the game's target audience probably associated with The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. There's a complicated backstory involving all the characters being stuffed animals brought to life by their owner Ingrid's twisted experiments, but it's sadly irrelevant to the game's actual story mode. Ingrid only gets mentioned in the Ingrid's Curse mode, a single-player Tetris-like mode that isn't too fun. The only way to keep your game going is to play with your usual spells, but instead of sending your blocks to the other screen to bedevil an opponent, you're trying to fill up rows of blocks. The shapes of the blocks you send over change rapidly, in a way that's very hard to keep track of, so it ultimately feels like playing a puzzle game version of Russian Roulette, only you have no way of knowing how many bullets are actually in the game.

Story Mode is the only way to play in single-player mode, since it lets you battle single CPU opponents. The opponents aren't terribly difficult, but that makes it a good place to learn the rules of the game. Best of all, as you play through, there are little bizarre conversations between various characters before and after the battles. I would think they had been badly translated, but I'm pretty sure this game was developed in English (if, admittedly, English as it exists in Singapore, home of developer Mikoishi). The result is a game full of fabulously insane dialogue that is supposedly motivating the, uh, bouts of falling block madness. Seriously, here's a sampling of actual dialog I ran across:

• "Yes. My jaws make happy; they are mine, of course."
• "Many things define defeat. I think losing is one of them."
• "I understand how you feel. Losing feels different from winning."
• "Buy health insurance! You will never know when you are gonna end up like me."
• "Blanket in the wash... I lost my defense."
• "I can handle failure until I lose."
• "Ok, then. I'll let you know when my misery is half my weight."
• "You insult my agility, I can take myself down."

Since Story Mode is by far the most fun mode, it really helps the game out that is has Achievements - yes, just like the 360 Achievements, although the game tells you how to get them all. Some you'll get just playing through the game and, say, pulling off an especially rad counterspell or a combo that annihilates a huge amount of blocks. Others you'll have to work at, but it gives you replay value and the few I tried weren't too frustrating, though you did have to think ahead.

I'm not sure if you can get achievements in the multiplayer modes. It never happened to me, at least, and I tried to make a point of doing multiplayer matches with every combination of people I could. The first thing you'll notice is that multiplayer is at its most fun when it's one-on-one, just like Story Mode. Matches can be very short or very long, depending on the skill of the players involve, and there's lots of good opportunities for trash talking. You lose the brain-damaged dialogue of Story Mode, but get the benefit of yelling at a friend. While the multiplayer is local-only, you can easily host up to three other people off of a single cart, which makes it a far more viable multiplayer title than it would be otherwise.

You also have the option to multiplay against the CPU, and doing 1 vs 1 CPU games can be a fun way to waste a little time while standing in lines or in the car. What isn't fun is trying any kind of multiplayer that involves three or four players. In this scenario, you're still essentially playing 1 vs 1, but you use tabs at the top of the screen to pick out which of the four players you're choosing to play against. This suggests the obvious tactic of everyone ganging up on one player, then someone else, and then resolving it as a 1 vs 1 battle. The experience is clearly never fun for whoever gets dogpiled, and if you don't dogpile the 4-man multiplayer doesn't feel any different than the 1 vs 1. You can also do three or four-man mutliplayer with the CPU, but most of my bouts like this were similarly unenjoyable. The CPU players tend to gang up on you, and once eliminated, you can... watch them finish their match. Yay?

I've played everything the current build has to offer, but of course I don't know if that's everything the final game will have to offer. Based on what I've played, I can offer Dropcast a limited recommendation. It's essentially a casual game geared toward kids and puzzle fanatics, so your own tastes are mostly going to determine whether or not you like it. It's definitely a better buy if you have friends to play against. The game's MSRP appears to be $19.99, and when you compare Dropcast to other casual puzzle games that debut at that price point, it's a fully-featured beast of a game with a lot of longevity. If you don't already really like competitive puzzle games, Dropcast probably won't convince you otherwise, and if you don't like kids' games you'll definitely find your money better spent on Puzzle Planet League. Dropcast ships on December 22, so you've got plenty of time to make up your mind in the meantime.

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