The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Coin Drop! is the other game Lobst suggested people should buy when she tweeted about NBA Jam. Again, dollar, random recommendation, and I immediately purchased it. A review I saw on Slide to Play compares the game to Peggle. I feel like this is unfair to Peggle. As random as Peggle is, it still feels like it uses a lot more skill than a normal board of Coin Drop! uses.
I say that, but Coin Drop! is still a ton of fun and does require some amount of thought to complete the levels with a high score. It’s just even more “press the button and hopefully pretty lights flash” than Peggle is.

Basically, you go through a series of stages. In these stages are various things: moving pegs, breakable blocks, bumpers, and so on. You have 20 coins to drop from the top of the screen. Bouncing off of things scores points, but you have to collect all 4 “bad coins” to complete the level and be able to move onto the next one. The faster you get those four, the more focus you can put on point-getting.

You can drop your coins from anywhere on the top of the screen. Things have to be timed for all the moving parts to bounce your coins around. However, you can drop up to 5 coins at a time, and I find that on many boards, you can simply drop 5 right there at the beginning and the chaos will hit most of what you’re aiming at without trying. Some levels will mix it up enough so that that strategy doesn’t work, and many levels, as you progress through the game, start adding gimmicks that require you to take a little more care in your shots. Eventually, for example, the game starts adding little pink lady coins that you have to break out and rescue for extra points. Saving them and collecting all the “bad” coins takes a lot more skill. Of course, the rescue is optional, and just for more points, but it’s a nice goal to make the game more complex if you want it.

There’s only one thing I don’t like about the game, and that’s the shaking. You can shake the iDevice to perform a “bump” on the virtual cabinet that you’re dropping coins into in order to use some extra skill in maneuvering the coins around. This is great in theory, but any movement just causes a generic “bump” motion to happen. Holding my iPad and shaking it, it feels really weird that the direction I am shaking the device doesn’t affect the way the coin bounces to the point that it really distracts me. Maybe that’s just a minor thing that only bothers me, though.

Still, this game is the perfect phone “waiting in line” game. It’s satisfying, takes mere moments to play a board, and is cheap. It also has a better sense of progression than something like Tiny Wings, because you’re making progress through a bunch of levels. You’re also unlocking a lot of new “skins” for your coins, so if you’d rather drop slices of lime or chocolate coins, you can do that too. There’s also a promise in the game of more free level updates, as so many iPhone games do, so that’s wonderful. If you’re the sort who enjoys a good time-waster, Coin Drop! is a good time-waster, and worth a look.