Colotristar is a puzzle game played on a 9×9 grid which is filled with four different colours of stars. You must join three or more of the same type to remove them from the board, you do this by swapping an adjoining star either horizontally or vertically with another star. The aim of the game is to clear as many of these stars as possible from the board.
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Graphics are fine and look the part of a puzzle game. There is just one piece of music which gets repetitive very fast mainly due to the Colotristar vocal repeated throughout the song, you can thankfully mute the song and/or play your own music. Sound effects are at a minimum but when used they sound OK.
There are two modes of play, single player and two player, with 999 levels in total that can be played in both modes from the start. The game is easy to play, ideally you want to clear as many stars from the board as possible, so you have to do some advance planning or you can just casually play as you go along. Moving the stars is simply a case of holding the A button while pressing a direction on the D-Pad of the star you want to swap with. You can move any star providing there is an adjoining star, so you can not move into a blank space for example.
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When you have removed as many stars as is possible, the screen will turn grey to indicate this. The screen will stay grey until you manually press Start and choose to restart or try another level. Your scores for each level are kept for the session only, if you switch off your 360 and return later they are not saved. I am not sure if this is a bug or that the developers forgot to save the scores, either way I found this very annoying as the whole point of the game is to beat your scores.
The two player mode is a nice feature in the game and is played on split screen, you can also set a time limit for how long the game should last. The boards are the same for both players but the second players board is flipped horizontally and vertically, most likely to prevent cheating by copying each others moves. The two player game is more fun than playing by yourself and it adds a competitive edge which until now had been lacking in the game. The game ends when both players can no longer make any more moves, the player with the highest score wins.
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This review is one of my shortest to date because I had trouble writing anything about it. Apart from the lack of game saves there is nothing wrong with the game, but there is nothing that makes the game stand out amongst the other puzzle games. Some improvements to the presentation, a high score table, saving the actual scores and maybe some other modes for example would have made this game more of a talking point.
The full game costs 240 :MSPoints: which I feel is a little too high compared to other games in this price range. The lack of polish and features changes my opinion from a recommended purchase to a game that you should try before buying.
You can find more information about the game and to purchase the full game or the trial here.
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