Akihabara is a district in Tokyo known for having lots of electronic shops.  Akihabara: Feel the Rhythm is a puzzle game with music elements.  It’s available for download on iOS, Google Play, and PC, but reviewed on iPad here.

A row of different shapes falls from the top of the screen to the bottom, similar to other puzzlers like Tetris.  A line also goes across the well from left to right.  When you tap the screen, the shape nearest the line will change to the shape indicated at the top of the screen.  Try to change the shapes so that when they hit the bottom, they’ll match four adjacent same shapes and disappear.  If you change a shape with each pass of the line, the point multiplier will go up by one, but it’ll reset back to one if you let it go by without changing a shape.  Also, you’ll get a higher score if you tap to change shapes closer to the beat of the rhythm of the music playing in the background.  Try to make to the end of the song without having shapes reach the top of the well.  If you do, it’s Game Over.

You can continue limitlessly, but you’ll receive a severe point reduction that gets higher the more you continue.  There are two modes of play.  In the campaign, you’ll do all the songs right in a row, which can be hard and long to make it through since there are ten songs.  You can also play each song separately that have been unlocked.  You can change the difficulty so you have to match more or less shapes, but if you do put it on Easy, your scores won’t be saved to the leaderboard.  The only problems I had with this game is that the rules were very challenging and I don’t think I ever truly got the hang of it, and the songs didn’t really draw me in either.  But if you like puzzle games with music elements like Lumines, you may want to check this one out, too.

Kid Factor:

Reading skill is helpful for some of the text instructions, and younger gamers may get frustrated at the high challenge.  Some may consider the game to have some mild suggestive themes, because the anime characters in the background sometimes wear slightly revealing outfits.  But at least this game has no in-game purchases or ads that I could tell.

Tags: Game Reviews