Pretty Girls Pop Match – PS5 Review

Pretty Girls Pop Match is the latest puzzle game in eastasiasoft’s Pretty Girls series, a series that has had takes on pretty much every puzzle game format you can think of.  From Mahjong to 2048, there isn’t any sub-genre that developers, Zoo Corporation, won’t put some Anime girl portraits on.  Strangely though, they’ve taken their time to get around to doing a classic ‘Match Three’ puzzler but Pop Match is here to put that right.

Match Three games were very popular a few years ago but still have a place in modern casual gaming.  You know the format and if you don’t your mum or nan probably does.  You swap tiles, usually gems, to make a row or column of three or more of the same colour.  Bejeweled used to be the daddy of this particular genre, or even games like Columns, Puyo Puyo or the majestic Super Foul Egg (shout out to my Amiga brethren).  More recently Candy Crush Saga has dominated the scene, somewhat sucking the life out of the genre as a whole.

But here is Pretty Girls Pop Match doing what Zoo Corporation do.  What you get here is a quest mode with 100 levels.  The core ‘match three’ mechanic features prominently of course and there aren’t many additional elements to worry about but the ones that are there definitely affect the gameplay.  The most basic is that your gems are hexagonal with a pointed corner at the top.  This means that when you clear a matched set, the ones above will drop down and, if there is space for it, will fall either left or right into any gap that exists.  So you can’t just expect straight verticality in a Tetris way.  There’s a slightly more liquid motion to it.

Matching threes is all well and good but when you match more, you’ll get weapons to use.  Matching four gives you a rocket which will clear a row or a column when activated (you can just tap the button to directly do it or use it in a swap to activate it one space away from where it currently exists).  Matching five gives you a fairly destructive magic wand that’ll clear out all gems of one colour.  L-shaped matches give you a bomb.  And, finally, the sword appears if you can create a 2×2 square.  That item will then seek out a gem that will directly help you progress to your target.

And by that we mean that each level has specific criteria to beat it.  It might be a score based one but, more interestingly, it often asks you to clear a number of gems of one or more colours.  A sword will target one of those.  Or one of the additional pieces that shows up on the board.  These can be shields, chests, bubbles and more.  These pieces can’t be matched but will be damaged if a match happens adjacent to them.  You’ll get the idea.

At the start of each level, you’ll get to pick a girl and these will boost up the power of whatever weapon is assigned to them – the sword, bomb or rocket.  Additionally, you’ll earn coins as you play which can further upgrade that boost.  It’s not very well sign-posted and you can only check if you have enough money by leaving the game but anyway, it’s quite a good little wrinkle on the gameplay.

When it comes to the basic screen-clearing match three kind of gameplay, Pretty Girls Pop Match isn’t particularly interesting.  It’s playable enough (although we’d have liked the cursor movement to snap to each gem rather than moving like a mouse – which definitely gives this PC port vibes) but where the game gets better is when levels come up that require a bit more thinking.  This usually means that your target pieces can’t directly be reached, such as in the screenshot below, and so you’ll need to create rockets or swords (bombs are pretty useless) to get them.

Unfortunately, this all means that the difficulty curve is all out of whack.  Of the 100 stages on offer, you’ll beat 90% on your first attempt.  That includes the final stage probably.  Other stages might take two or three.  During the whole run only two took more than that and one of those (that was located somewhere between 30 and 40) required more attempts.  That one felt like it relied on luck a lot and was the only sticking point in an otherwise straightforward playthrough.

Completing all the stages took a few hours somewhere around three or four maybe (we weren’t counting) and you know what?  It wasn’t a bad time at all.  Sure, it wasn’t the most thrilling, challenging or original game but we like a bit of match three gameplay and we liked Pop Match‘s stripped down approach.  To many games add unnecessary upgrades, currencies and god knows what else to these sort of games.  Pop Match‘s upgrade system was very limited and didn’t need much explaining.  Just fire it up and go.

The presentation is suitably clean, colourful and crisp.  Sure, there’s the Anime girls (that a disclaimer explains are all over 18 because, yeah, that’s something that Anime generally seems to play fast and loose with) and we’d have liked the option to remove them from the screen altogether because we’re not fans of any of that and, despite them being “over 18” they all do that incessant Anime girl squeaky voice thing.  But our focus was on the gems and so that all became quite easy to ignore.

And that’s it really.  Look, this is basic match three gaming with the occasionally interesting level and nothing more.  If you like casual puzzle games, this’ll do.  Trophy whores will enjoy the double platinum also (as ever, eastasiasoft give you the PS4 and PS5 versions bundled together) and puzzle fans looking for something to jam to during a podcast will find it all reasonably addictive and enjoyable.  That’s a win overall we reckon.