TL;DR – Peggle Deluxe/Extreme/Nights are great and fun little casual time-wasters. It’s not a particularly complex series of games, but they’re easy to pick up and hard to master with solid attention to detail and close to 250 unique levels between the 3 games. Anyone who doesn’t like Peggle is tired of life.
Quick Note: Want more Peggle? Get Peggle Extreme from Steam for free.
At the time of writing I’m drunk on Christmas Joy and so haven’t been able to play anything that requires extended periods of isolation (due to the commitments of having family and friends) or particularly complex systems as I’ve either been bloated on food or just plain drunk. In spite of this handicap I’m still consistent in my desire to produce 1 review per week, come what may, and so I’ve taken a look at the Peggle series which I picked up during the Christmas Steam sale for a whole 124 great British pennies. Having basically forgotten about the games since they were relevant wayyy back in 2007ish I’d also forgotten just how fun it is. For the uninitiated, the Peggle games feature a (largely) stationery board is filled with a mix of Orange, Blue and Green “pegs” or dots which you shoot a limited number of balls at from the top of the screen. The main challenge is that you never have enough balls to easily hit the Orange pegs one by one, so successfully gaining extra balls and aiming shots so that you can hit a bunch with a single shot is the aim of the game. To add further complexity there are multiple Peggle “masters” that each give you a special ability when you hit one of the rare green pegs, alongside a purple peg that is randomly selected from the remaining blue pegs on each turn before you take each shot and which gives you a considerably higher amount of points for hitting it.
And generally you’ll want to hit it, while not explicitly aiming for it as gaining 25,000 points from a single shot is one of the sure-fire ways of getting an extra ball in your roster. Fortunately as you hit orange pegs you’ll fill up that bar on the right and thus increase your score multiplier for each peg hit. There are some other mechanics in play such as the fact that you can get multiple balls from one shot, albeit with the required score scaling upwards (so initially 25,000 then 75,000 and so on), the fact that stages might have moving hazards or teleportation “bubbles” that move the ball elsewhere and even stages where the pegs themselves move around. As mentioned above there are around 10 Peggle Masters across the games, each with their own ability and while you’re initially “stuck” with one of them for 5 levels, you’re able to select the one you want for the last 5 and then all of the myriad challenge maps. You’d think this would mean that the first 50 or so levels of each game are essentially a tutorial, but honestly some of the latter stages can be a challenge so it’s more of a gentle campaign curve than anything.
In terms of differences between the games, there aren’t many which is why I’ve bundled them all into a singular review. Peggle Deluxe is the base game with 9 masters, 55 “normal” stages and a further 75 challenge stages that are unlocked once you’ve cleared the normal ones. Peggle Nights is a stand-alone expansion, offering a further 55 stages with one extra master and then a batch of 75 more challenge stages. Finally Peggle Extreme is a freebie quasi-demo made in collaboration between PopCap and Valve, with 10 normal stages and then a further 5 challenge stages. Extreme features (for want of a better word) various Valve characters and sound effects, but is otherwise just an extra batch of content for free on Steam. Every game features a “Duel” mode where you can play against other players, albeit on your own stages taking a turn at a time to compete for the higher score. This duel mode is also used on occasion for the challenge maps where you duel an AI to try and beat their score. That’s about it for the series depth, as the challenge really is trying to figure out how to control the ball’s mechanics as you aim to shoot as many pegs as possible across each stage. There are tricks you can perform to increase your score such as sliding your ball across a large amount of blocks, pinging your ball from a non-blue peg to another non-blue peg across a large distance and so on but these don’t impact your ability to gain extra free balls.
Before wrapping everything up I’d just like to take a quick moment to praise the game’s soundtrack (which features Ode to Joy and a handful of original background tracks) alongside it’s charming and simple art-style. Everything is inoculated with a good sense of fun and the game is challenging enough you can’t blitz through it without thinking, but it’s also not so challenging that you’ll get particularly stuck or frustrated. Well, some of the challenge maps not-withstanding but the clue is in the name! The master abilities are also nicely implemented, ensuring that each player will have their own favourite (mine is Master Hu, an owl with the ability to tweak your shot to make it 200% more Zen and get a bunch of extra pegs) while the master’s themselves are sweet enough that this can still be a kid’s game. It’s altogether a great example of a Casual game, as while the budget was small the focus to detail is still there and it can run on basically any system without ever feeling short of content or effort.
So in conclusion then, the Peggle games are great fun and perfect for lazy holiday seasons or as a gift for more casual gamers. The sort of game that like Tetris or Mario Kart, can basically be enjoyed by anyone in spite of their circumstances. Considering the ludicrously cheap price, I’d urge everyone to give it a go even if they normally consider themselves to be too HARDCORE for such trifling little cutesy games. My only real complaint is the fact that Peggle 2 ended up a console exclusive game for… reasons and as a consequence is only available on Xbox 360 and Xbox One. While they can be emulated easily enough, in the meantime pickup the Peggle pack for practically nothing and have some fun 8)