0D Beat Drop is a Columns-style block stacking game; struggling amidst a sea of Columns-style block stacking games now available in the Xbox LIVE Arcade marketplace. Can it stand out from the crowd, and, more importantly, is it entertaining enough to be worth 800 of your hard earned Microsoft Points? The answer, in the end, largely depends on how much you love Columns-style block stacking games.
Beat Drop’s gameplay will be largely familiar to pretty much anyone who’s familiar with Tetris, and who isn’t familiar with Tetris? Coloured blocks go down the screen, you stack them next to blocks of the matching colour, blocks go boom, you gain points. Stack the blocks too high, you lose. Beat Drop’s caveat is its use of music, specifically the rhythm of the backing music, as a defining feature of the gameplay. The graphics on screen pulse to the beat of the music (as does, quite irritatingly, your controller), and, if you hit a button in time to the beat, your blocks will slam down into the field, eliminating any matching blocks they connect with.
This feature works well, and adds a new level of pace and strategy to the otherwise quite vanilla gameplay; the beat drop system lets you set up strings of combos, and slamming your final block down onto a carefully constructed tower in time to a thumping tune is really quite rewarding. If your opponent lets you, of course.
