'10/10' - AppAdvice'9/10' -Pocket Gamer, Gold Award '9/10' - TouchArcade'9/10' - 148AppsPl. Shibuya is more for the younger crowd, but (as someone else said) I do think Shibuya is changing. More of Shibuya is more buzzing into the wee hours. Just a whole bunch of cafes, bars and izakayas open late. East side of Shinjuku has that, too, but I find the nightspots in Shibuya to be less intimidating.
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I never played the original. Nor have I ever been to Japan, let alone in Tokyo. So I had no idea that it was famed for its nightlife and spectacular advertising screens.For the sake of the citizens of the real Shibuya, I hope it's nothing like its video game namesake. Otherwise everyone would be fleeing in screaming terror as massive blocks of pulsating pastel plummeted from the sky to a cheery chiptune groove.This is an action puzzler. And like all the best action puzzle games it has a simple mechanic that's hard to explain and much, much harder to execute. GeometricEmpty rectangles descend from the top of the screen at a speed dictacted by the difficulty setting.
To the left is a little column showing a sequence of colours.The first block you touch gets the colour at the bottom, then the column slides down to reveal a new colour at the top.So you keep tapping rectangles as they fall, and each of them turns the colour at the bottom of the sequence.Your job is just to make sure you get sequences of two or more colours together. Then you can tap the collection and the rectangles vanish.Single ones stay on the stack, taking up essential screen real estate unless you can somehow free them and match them up with a partner.Fail to keep pace with the plunging rectangles and let the screen fill and it's game over.
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Otherwise you're on a timer, and you're aiming for a high score before the clock ticks down.Scoring is esoteric and confusing. Clearing the screen of colour gets you bonus points. Getting stacks of more than two gets you bonus points. Allowing a stack to accumulate and then tapping to shift several combos at once gets you bonus points. EsotericThere are optional tutorials that explain all that.
In reality, you won't care. In reality you'll be desparately fumbling at the screen with sweaty fingers while swearing like a trooper.In reality, you'll wonder how the human mind could ever hope to juggle geometry and colour fast enough to get any combos at all.But if you want to progress in Shibuya Grandmaster, you'll have to learn.The Grandmaster suffix to the original title hints at the biggest change in the game play. You're encouraged to try and earn ranks, from novice all the way up to Grandmaster.Each has a checklist of achievements to tick off.
Get ten four-block combos in one game. Get two thousand points on 'fury' difficulty.
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That sort of thing.It's a bit like the missions you get in endless runners. Except in Shibuya they're fixed in place. These goals make the game incredibly addictive. Not least because you'll have to work really hard to earn them. MagicAfter the first few ranks, you'll hit a difficulty spike if you want to progress further.
Because the secret of Shibuya is that it demands skill at a whole bunch of different things at once.There aren't tried an tested patterns to fall back on. Sometimes you make a combo by stacking colours together. Sometimes you make one by having lone matching colours sandwiching a different combo.Sometimes you can chop and change to get colours to line up. Sometimes you desperately juggle individual stripes as best you can.It's fast, furious and utterly enthralling. Ever so slowly you start to learn how to co-ordinate your fingers and your brain and that little stack of colours to do better.The scores creep up. Another rank falls and it feels like victory. Bought at the cost of hours of practice and hours of tossing and turning at night, dreaming about neon blocks descending from the sky to crush you.But it's worth it.
Developer:Price: FREEVersion Reviewed: 1.0App Reviewed on: iPhone 5Graphics / Sound Rating:Gameplay Rating:Playtime Rating:Replay Value Rating:Overall Rating:Shibuya Grandmaster is a reimagined version of, which was a colorful and stylish puzzle game released for iOS back in 2010. While Shibuya Grandmaster is indeed a new and separate game from its predecessor, it feels much more like a re-tuned version - especially since the core gameplay is the same and the original is no longer available on the App Store. That being said, it manages to still deliver the same great puzzle experience while feeling like a distinct experience from the original, primarily because of its progression-based structure.Shibuyais a matching puzzle game in which tiles of different colors all descend into a single column, and it's up to players to choose the order of these colored blocks before they fall in order to create matches, chain together combos, and keep the screen from filling up. While the original allowed for two modes of play, Shibuya Grandmaster sticks to having players challenge themselves in two minute rounds of various speeds that get unlocked as they complete missions.The biggest change between Shibuya and Shibuya Grandmaster is the presence of missions. When players start off, they're at the bottom of a chain of ranks; each of which has a set of missions associated with it.
These missions can be anything from surviving a round of a particular speed setting to lining up specific combos or matches. After completing all of the missions in a set, players rank up and receive new missions to complete up until they reach the rank of 'Grandmaster.'
This mission structure really makes Shibuya Grandmaster feel like more than a casual puzzle game, as there's always a new challenge for players to take on. That being said, the mission system isn't as flexible as some other games like, which means that players can find themselves with one particularly difficult mission that they just have to repeatedly try in the hopes of eventually passing on to the next rank. This kind of structure makes a certain amount of sense considering the gates for mission are particular ranks that are supposed to denote skill, but it can still be frustrating to play round after round with no forward movement in rank.The other thing to note about Shibuya Grandmaster is that it looks and sounds great. The bright neon colors and slick interface look really nice running at 60 frames per second, and the soundtrack is a set of smooth electronic dance tracks that fit the futuristic city vibe extremely well.Shibuya Grandmaster is a pretty phenomenal package overall. It offers up simple but challenging puzzling, completely free of charge. There are a few in-app purchases, but all of the things players can buy are purely aesthetic. Even with the somewhat inflexible mission structure, Shibuya Grandmaster is a very solid package and well worth picking up.
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March 2023
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