Video Game Gazette
I have always been a fan of puzzle games. My favorites, such as Tricky Kick, Denki Blocks, and Chu Chu Rocket, tend to be less action oriented than classics like Tetris and Bubble Bobble. Gridders falls somewhere in between. There is just enough action to satisfy the arcade gamer, but not enough to turn off pure puzzle fans.
Unlike some puzzle games, there is actually a story behind Gridders. You play the role of Zack, a lowly employee at a big corporation. One day you get a message that is stuck to your paycheck that says that there is a secret in the basement. When you go down to investigate you find yourself trapped in the grid. In searching for an exit you find a brown bone. When you pick it up, Fidex the robot dog appears to help you find your way out. The rest of the story is revealed in cut scenes after each level.
Gridders refuses to be pigeonholed into a standard puzzle genera like a Tetris clone. It is best compared with a game like Chip’s Challenge, in which your character must solve puzzles to navigate a maze. The game takes place on a grid on which large cubes are rolling around. The objective of the game is to find the green pyramid keys and help Zack reach the exit to escape the grid. The puzzles involve manipulating the cubes with your character to reveal the keys and reach the exit. Like many puzzle games, including Tricky Kick, the levels are timed. However, there is ample time to complete the levels, and you can obtain extra time by picking up gems.
There are four basic types of cubes on the grid: (1) Yellow stripped killer cubes that will crush you; (2) Key cubes that reveal green pyramids; (3) Red cubes; and (4) Green stationary cubes. If you stop a key cube by standing in its path, a green pyramid will be revealed, and the cubes behind it turn into red cubes. Much of the challenge in the game is finding ways to stop the key cubes and reach the keys. If a cube rolls over a green pyramid then the pyramid is destroyed. Thus, you have to do more than just release a key, you have to be able to get to it. In the later levels there are yellow cubes that reveal keys if you use other cubes to stop them. This is where the green cubes come into play. They can be pushed into place and used to stop the yellow cubes. There are also blocks that change the direction in which cubes travel. On some stages, the grid consists of different levels. To access the other levels, you need to manipulate the blocks so that you can climb up or down to the new area. All of this may sound rather complicated, but the game is actually quite simple and intuitive.
I found that the game had a good balance between action and pure puzzles. The action element and time limit never interfered with my ability to complete the puzzles, thus pure puzzle fans should not be put off. However, they added enough action to make the game play more like a classic arcade game. There levels range in difficulty from trivially simple to ones that are as challenging as you will find in a video game. So if you are into puzzle games, you should definitely try to pick this one up.
