Soldam: Drop, Connect, Erase

Genre: Falling Block Puzzle

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local / Online)

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Review:

Soldam is a Falling Block Puzzle game released in 2017 on Nintendo Switch. In this game, players clear rows of colored blocks by ensuring every block in the row is the same color, changing colors using rules similar to Othello or Reversi.

The presentation here is decent but nothing special, using colorful, cartoony 2D images for both the gameplay and the characters populating menus and the edges of the screen, all backed by cheerful music that works with the game’s look, but doesn’t do anything memorable. It works, but there’s nothing remarkable here.

The gameplay at least has a clever idea, mixing a color-matching Falling Block Puzzle game with Reversi rules, but unfortunately it doesn’t really work in execution. It’s not always clear which blocks will change color, especially when you drop a multi-colored block that will cause conflicting matches with its component parts. Plus, if you have the wrong color buried under other colors, it’s far too difficult to correct this problem, especially once the game introduces more than two colors into the mix.

As a result, Soldam is a Puzzle game that presents an interesting idea, but fails to deliver satisfying gameplay based on that idea, instead complicating the rules in ways that make for confusion and frustration. You have far too many great Puzzle games on Nintendo Switch to waste time and money on this one.

tl;dr – Soldam is a Falling Block Puzzle game that has you clearing rows of like-colored blocks and changing the color of block that have already been placed using rules similar to Othello or Reversi. While it’s a good idea, the execution is muddled and confusing in ways that just lead to frustration. I don’t recommend this game.

Grade: C-

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