Sparkle Unleashed

While the premise of the game is not new, it's fun. Graphics are not great but that's not the end of the world. What made it too frustrating to continue playing is that the controls sometimes went awry at critical points, switching rather than shooting. I don't mind losing fair and square, I do mind losing because things stop working the way you expect them to.

This game's gameplay, difficulty curve, and power ups/combos really keep you on your toes. I'd recomend this game to people who like puzzle/strategy of this sort.

es un buen juego y muy entretenido, llega al punto de engancharte, el problema es la mala programacion con las bolas de colores, pierdes muchas veces porque los colores que tocan son demasiado random y te tiras un rato sin que salga el color que necesitas, pero por lo demas el juego es muy entretenido

So this game on the surface looks good, Its a good Zuma inspired game and has 108 levels right? Well this isnt the whole truth. There are 108 levels you have to do in the "Campaign" However, after completing the entire campaign on Normal I have discovered that, in reality there are only 21 actual levels. Basically, its the same 21 levels repeated over and over across 108 levels. Unlike Zuma which had a different level for each of its stages. This quickly becomes apparent when you unlock Survival mode. Survival mode unlocks really early in this game, so you can see for yourself how few levels there are. The game tries to make up for this with its newly introduced mechanics. So... Lets review this games Mechanics. Before we get into the mechanics though one thing I should mention. The devs made the strange decision to make all levels a slide level where you slide across the bottom of the screen instead of being placed in the middle of the stage. They also decided it would be a grand idea to not include the mechanic Zuma Revenge had where you can look behind you away from the track to throw away orbs. This means that you basically cannot throw away orbs in this game unless you happen to have a gap in the line. You can try to throw the orbs off in the corners, but I found in some levels the orb line is actually rendered off screen so if you shoot there, it connects to the orb line and pushes everything forward which can cause you to lose if you don't realize this quickly. This also greatly hurts the level variety as you arent placed in different positions on each track, you're ALWAYS on the bottom of the screen no matter what. theres no two stages split in half like in Zuma revenge or other stuff like that. Its always the same thing but with the track being a different path. With that in mind lets move onto the mechanics. These mechanics are more annoying then anything. Why? Well. Lets start off with what you will encounter first. The Stone Orb. The Stone Orb is a colorless, special orb that cannot be matched but instead needs a match made next to it in order to be destroyed. The Stone Orb would actually be an interesting mechanic on its own if it werent for the second mechanic. Armored Orbs. Yeah... thats right you heard me.. Armored orbs require 2 matches to be destroyed instead of 1, meaning if you match it, instead of being destroyed, its armor breaks instead. Why is this an issue? Well for 1, it can easily interrupt combos. If you have say 2 greens in between some blue orbs, and you break the 2 greens. if one of them is armored it prevents the combo from happening which can get you killed in some instances. But more importantly Stone Orbs can also be Armored. That's right... you heard me. Armored Stone Orbs. Just... Why? So you have an orb that cannot be destroyed unless you make a match next to it and have to do it twice? Also, it gets even worse past level 100. Once you get to level 100+ Litteraly every single orb will be Armored and you will need to destroy the entire Pusher line twice in order to destroy it. This gets even worse when this game also adopts the system Zuma uses where it eventually introduces purple and brown orbs. So you're basically fighting your own launcher to get the correct color since the devs decided it would be a great idea to reduce the amount of orbs in your slinger from 3 to 2. on top of having to match each orb twice. Oh and this game also has the two hole levels as well. Meaning you have to fight against two holes that have armored orbs that need to be matched twice, and armored stone orbs. The last issue in terms of the mechanics is the speed of the orbs. I'm not joking you when you get to later levels the orbs start moving so fast that they they might as well be breaking the sound barrier. So if you aren't quick thinking on your feet, don't expect to beat this game. The speed is barely tolerable on normal difficulty. Oh you appear to look confused. Why did I say Normal difficulty? That's because there's actually also a hard mode, and Nightmare mode. Playing on these difficulties will have the Armored Orbs and Stone Orbs appearing much earlier then they're supposed to and the orbs move even FASTER on hard and nightmare. The orbs in Nightmare difficulty move so insanely fast that you'd need to have the fastest reaction time in the west in order to do it. They basically move at light speed on nightmare difficulty. Now combine this insane speed with Armored Orbs and Armored Stone Orbs and two holes, and yeah you're gonna need a lot of RNG luck to do this one. Speaking of, a mechanic I forgot to mention is theres no "ZUMA" to save you here either. Instead of each level being progress based, you have to destroy a certain number of pushers to complete a level. which increases in number depending on the difficulty, up to having to destroy 10 full pushers to clear a level. There's also levels where you have to survive 120 seconds and the orbs come out endlessly instead of being attached to pushers. aka turning the game into a regular Zuma level. Also you actually need to beat this game THREE(technically two) times to fully complete the game. Because when you beat Normal mode, it doesn't unlock nightmare difficulty oh no no no. You have to beat the game on hard to unlock nightmare difficulty. So if you beat the game on normal, you're gonna have to play those "108" levels again on hard to unlock Nightmare difficulty, and then another 108 to beat the game on nightmare. Thats a total of 324 levels. Aka you doing the same 21 stages over and over 324 times. This can very quickly get repetitive and boring. You can get around this a little bit if you switch your game from normal to hard right at the start of the game, because they forgot to lock hard difficulty behind defeating normal, so you can reduce the pain by doing the campaign on hard instead of normal, but good luck doing this without your power-ups. Why dont you have your power-ups? because your powerups are locked silly. This game has a weird feature where instead of all of your power-ups being unlocked, you have to beat a certain number of levels to gain a key. This key lets you unlock a new ability. which if you try to start hard mode this way, its gonna be very difficult as the game is going to act like you already have these powers unlocked when it starts immediately throwing purple orbs at you, and very quickly armored/stone orbs at you as well. Basically, Buy sparkle 2 instead of this game. its a far superior game and actually does its mechanics far better than sparkle unleashed does.

Just a relaxing game to play.

[h1][b]Sparkle Unleashed[/b][/h1] [h3][b]Time Played:[/b][/h3] 4.5 Hours [h3][b]Last Played:[/b][/h3] 17th of January 2026 [hr][/hr] Waiting for Terraria 1.4.5 Volume 17. Without getting into too many of the details, I've a certain affection for 10Tons as a developer, given Crimsonland, another game of theirs, helped me through the 3 worst days of my existence. Thus, with high hopes, I went into this one. [h3][b]Yay:[/b][/h3] + Just the title screen enthralled me. + Fully-voiced intro cinematic. + The music, while much more involved than I thought it would be, and more “epic adventure” than “tranquil garden”, greatly enhanced the experience. + Not just a reskinned Zuma, as you don't fire from a central point, and I also don't remember that game having power ups. + Yes, this is to state that powerups are found in this. +...and some can be upgraded. + In spite of an initial “oh no” about alt-tabbing, I am pleased to report it does so fine. + I loved some of the level names, like “The Forgotten Well”, and its successor “The Sodden Trunk. + Mixing is fine, though, this likely signals it's a bit on the loud side, so for those that don't turn their volume up until it's just audible, be wary of ear damage, and maybe adjust things down. + Has what I call “Nova-stalgia”, wherein something brand new to me triggers that emotion, given this seems exactly like something I would have played in the first two years of having my Steam Account. [h3][b]Meh:[/b][/h3] ~ Hard to accurately-place orbs in some angles. ~ Game never tells you “shoot” can be held down to show a lead, but as you can move your cursor where you want to blap an orb in, that's not necessary. [h3][b]Nay:[/b][/h3] - Trails only roll back on themselves when they match with the ones after the gap. - This means you can have powerups blocked by non-moving orbs. - If you slot a shot into a trail where one of those items is, as well, you don't get it, making many lost because they over-lapped a trail. - The “Frost” powerup also does not roll things back at normal speed, making it near-useless. - The game is way too long in my opinion. Had they found a way to keep things fresh, this would not be an issue, but only a handful are “survival” levels in-campaign, which has 108 levels total, but most of the maps reappear several times, after just the 2Xth/nd stage. - New elements/orb types also stop being introduced around this point, leading to massive amounts of repetition. - The Achievements only serve to worsen this, as you need to beat the entire game again on both hard, and nightmare...yes, all 108 levels for a total of 324, in order to get them all. - 5 Stars on even the first survival map is seemingly-impossible, yet you also not only need to do all of them for another achievement, but people have said it's broken, bugger, or otherwise does not unlock, even after meeting the requirements... [hr][/hr] [h3][b]Verdict:[/b][/h3] While this has not sullied my image of 10Ton[ne]s, I definitely feel this game could, and should, have been a quarter of the length, even for non-achievement hunters. No, they could not have added every power up, but many of those could have been saved for Sparkle 2. Thus, while I very much think the Nova-stalgia kept it from the lower two ranks, as is, it was... [h3][b]Placed in:[/b][/h3] 3: Merit-Mixed.