Have you ever played a ball shooter only to be frustrated when the colored ball you need to make a multi-combination match misses by just a few pixels? Haven’t you ever wished you could just move your cursor to the exact spot you need the ball to be and simply click on it? Well, Charma is a ball-matching action puzzler that allows you to do just that, and that’s just one of its good points.

Charma – The Land of Enchantment, or Charma for short, is a ball matcher that doesn’t actually use balls – in their place we have the adorable little Charmies, little walking fuzzballs that come in every color of the rainbow, and then some. You have to “rescue” all the Charmies in each level as you progress across lava, desert, forest, swamp and snow terrains towards the magical homeland of Charma.

There are other differences, too: Charmies are much larger than the typical colored ball from ball shooters like Inca Ball and Luxor. This makes them easier to click on, which is important since you create sets of 3 or more of the same color by clicking on first one, then another Charmie, in order to swap their places. Once matched sets are created, they pop, and vanish. Pop all the lines of Charmies in a level and you win; let the relentless line dance of Charmies get to the end of the twisting and turning track and you lose. It’s a simple mechanic but it works really well.

Like in other ball matchers, you can pop multiple sets with a single swap if you’re smart, and the trick to scoring extra points is to create the right combos and chains with a few strategic swaps. But that isn’t as easy as it seems, because the expertly designed levels aren’t just for show. Buildings, fallen logs and other objects can obstruct your clicks, while many levels have one or more tunnels to allow the Charmies to loop their tracks and double back multiple times. Often a long line of Charmies cannot be seen all at once since portions of it will always be hidden – so you really have to memorize which colors came in which order.

We particularly liked the power-up system in Charma. It’s dead simple, rejecting the fancy gimmicks of other games like shopping screens and large inventories of power-ups to choose from. Instead, power-ups randomly appear at different points onscreen for a few seconds – click on them and then on the target Charmie, and presto! You get effects ranging from slowdowns to color changers, with new power-ups being introduced as you go along. This might be too simple for some gamers, but we appreciated that it keeps the game focused.

Finally, we could praise the look and sound of the game to the skies, since each of the levels is lovingly crafted to be both beautiful and a unique play experience, and the music and cute yelps of the Charmies add a lot of, er, charm, to the game. But the best design of all is the Charmies themselves. A little ball of colored fur, two huge eyes, two pointy ears, and tiny little hands and feet. These cute mascots really steal the show!

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