Nintendo DS Lite Game Review: Pogo Island

A spin off of the very popular Pogo Games, this cart contains five of Pogo's more popular games, allowing you to play them wherever you go, win tokens, and upload them to your pogo account. The games are all loosely tied together under a story mode, which while being mildly fun, doesn't exactly make it compelling. But then, anyone who is buying this is buying it for the actual games, rather than a deep and meaningful story arc.

Word Whomp - More or less identical to the online version, a simple word game where you're given six letters and have to find as many possible words using those letters within a time limit. Well executed, although oddly the DS version doesn't recognise some words that the original happily accepts.

Tri-Peaks Solitaire - Solo card game, where you have to try and clear the screen of card in sequential order. Again, this is almost exactly like the online version.

Poppit! - A version of the popular style of game where you have to pop 3 or more like-coloured balloons in order to move the rest and clear the screen. To all intents and purposes, again identical to the original.

Squelchies - Similar deal to Poppit!, except you clear the little coloured squeaky things by transposing them with each other than popping them, and more Tetris-like in feel as the screen constantly descends as you play.

Phlinx - If you've ever played Puzzle Bobble, Bust-a-move, or the shareware PC game Snood, you'll know what to expect here. Shoot balls of various colours at a descending screen of similar balls in order to knock them down before they crush you.

Good use of the DS' features on the whole, the interface with the touch-screen and dual screens used to maximum advantage. No microphone use, but frankly, I never see that as a bad thing. Wifi connection is a little odd; while on a train journey my wife and I discovered you couldn't simply connect player to player to play, but would need to connect through the internet. Presumably this is so you're linked to Pogo's servers, but I can't really see why that would be necessary.

In all, a fun little game, especially if you're a fan of the online games.