In making Glyph 2, veteran game developer Sandlot Games has gone back and redeveloped their sleeper hit, Glyph, packing it with more features than you can shake a magic wand at. The result is the transformation of Glyph from a simple little run of the mill match-3 collapse game with pretty graphics into a sort of “collapse-style match-3 opus” that is far more expansive, varied, and complex. Does that actually make a better game? Well, actually, it does. And more power to them, I say.

The original Glyph was basically a nice cross between the “click on big sets of tiles” gameplay of Collapse and the “dig through base tiles” gameplay of games like Maui Wowee and all of the match-3 games that copied it over the years. Keep matching, and trying to develope bigger match-sets while “digging through the tiles” to uncover the magical glyphs underneath. Aside from this pleasant but simple twist on match-3 gameplay, Glyph added some beautiful effects and a strange mystic story about the elements that I honestly never read. In the end, it was a gem of a game that should have done better than it did in the marketplace.

Interestingly the original Glyph never made it into the top-10 on Big Fish or iWin, but actually made it to #1 at Real/Gamehouse, where it was on the Top-Ten list for over a month, thus proving that there is a big difference between the preferences of Real Arcade gamers and Big Fish Games gamers. Maybe it suffered from not having any pineapples in the curtains to click on. We can only wonder. As such, we were worried we’d never see the game again. So we were naturally pleased to see that Sandlot thought the game a big enough success to merit a sequel.

And what a sequel it is. It’s like the developers at Sandlot trolled every casual game that has come out in the last 4 years, and cherry-picked some of the best features from all of them. Subgames? Yep. New innovative specials? Got ‘em. Special powers you can buy by building a city? Yep, that too. More involved story with beautiful voice over? Yes indeed. This approach could have seemed disjointed and “kitchen sink-ey” but it all actually works well together to make a big game that seems to grow larger and larger as you play it. In fact, one of the strongest parts of the design is the way the game unfolds piece by piece, adding some new gameplay every few minutes without ever overwhelming the player with tips and hints. That kind of design curve is very difficult to do well, and Sandlot has done a truly beautiful job here.

Some game design points that deserve special mention include a wonderful “light and dark” mechanic that is better seen than explained, specials that you activate by drawing gestures on the screen with your mouse (somebody at Sandlot has been playing with his Wii lately), a great mini-task system that gives you other goals to meet as you play or bonus points like clearing a certain number of one color tiles or using a certain number of specials, and a great gesture-based subgame between levels. This is all wrapped in beautiful art, wonderful special effects, and a general level of stability and polish that is a simple pleasure to play.

To be clear, at heart the game is a collapse style matching game, but saying that is like saying a Ferrari is still just a car. This is a truly beautiful little game from a company that consistently delivers quality products. If you’re not going to download this and give it a try, what are you playing? Seriously – we want to know, because this game rocks.

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(8 votes, average: 4.38 out of 5)

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