Puyo Puyo Champions takes a venerable puzzler and updates it for the eSports scene. Here’s our review of a solid puzzler.
Puyo Puyo Champions is a niche entry in an already niche series, intended primarily for the very best in the scene (in Japan, it’s called Puyo Puyo eSports).
It’s bare-bones, offering only what is needed for competitive Puyo Puyo players, while many who are only vaguely familiar with the goo-popping puzzler may struggle to get to grips with it. It’s Puyo Puyo though, so it’s still as fun as it’s always been.
You’re probably already familiar with Puyo Puyo; the goal is to match up four of the same coloured blobs (Puyos), and place them in a way that sets off massive chains of popping puyos across the screen.
Champions includes two of the most popular rulesets, Puyo Puyo 2, which is the purist’s game, and Puyo Puyo Fever, which rewards character-specific patterns with the ability to do large amounts of damage to the enemy.
Champions is heavily based on its immediate predecessor, the brilliant Puyo Puyo Tetris, and, at a glance, it’d be easy to see it as PPT with the Tetris bit lopped off and half the price.
And, for the 99%, that’d be a fair assessment: a few characters return from older Puyo games, but it’s missing a single-player campaign or any of the superfluous modes that competitive players wouldn’t be interested in. There also isn’t any sort of tutorial mode, so this is definitely not an entry for newcomers or casual fans looking to reconnect.
For those who are way into their Puyo Puyo and know the series well, though, Champions does offer a sense of balance and focus that its Tetris-tinged sibling couldn’t, offering all kinds of settings and modifiers to help make training for the main event, online play, more efficient.
In single-player mode, you can apply handicaps, change the combo rules, and tweak virtually every part of the game to make practising racking up those 15-chains a simpler affair. While in multiplayer, annotated replays and a full tournament mode help both learning and competing easier.
Online is where things falter for Champions. You’d hope a game built around competitive play and rankings would have better netcode, but many games – even with people in the same region – are plagued by lag and connection failures.
It’s not a huge deal for this sort of game, and finding other players at any time of day is almost scarily quick on PC, but it does take you out of the state of flow Puyo is supposed to get you into.
Puyo Puyo Champions isn’t for everyone, but then that’s the entire point of its existence. This is a streamlined tool for people who are dedicated to popping their Puyos and bagging big combos. If you don’t know your stair chains from your GTR, there are much more accessible entries available. But for those who can sandwich and dig with the best of them, this is where the best in Puyo Puyo is now happening.
Highlight
The skill ceiling in Puyo Puyo is somewhere in the upper stratosphere, but it gets its claws into you with that first, simple two-chain combo. Before long, you’re poring over YouTube guides, wikis, and online chain simulators to improve, watching replay after replay to hopefully pick up some hints.
Verdict: 63%
A glut of content and full backing from Sega going forward, this is the start of a new era for Puyo Puyo fanatics.
Info
Genre: Puzzle
Format: PC (tested) / PS4 / XBO / Switch
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Rising Star Games
Price: £22.49
Release: Out now
