Burdaloo: A Flash in the pan

I’ll admit, I’m not much of a casual gamer. I don’t take the subway or bus, generally don’t have time during work to play Scrabulous (may it rest in peace) or Minesweeper (I’m a newspaper copy editor), and at my local coffee shop, I prefer tinkering with my iPhone rather than my DS or PSP.

However, I believe it is healthy to dip into other types of genres every once in a while. CasualCafe, a developer of Facebook applications, recently introduced two Flash games, one of which is curiously titled Burdaloo.

Think of Burdaloo as Bejeweled on rails. Instead of swapping adjacent gems to form a chain of three, you’re moving entire rows or columns of ”Burds” to get three of them adjacent to each other. To clear each stage, you need to shoo away a certain number of specific birds, er, Burds. The game throws in a few wrenches that hamper movement, but unlockable achievements grant the player in-game cafe points to buy power-ups that come in handy when you’re in a tight spot. A timer determines your score for each level.

Interesting bonus games are sprinkled across Burdaloo’s 70 stages. (For the record, I got through about half of them over the course of a week.) One involves replicating a certain pattern of Burds on the screen, kind of like a tile puzzle; another plays similar to Tetris, in which you have to prevent Burds from filling up the screen. 

Upon first glance, Burdaloo is quite pretty, with its pastel color palette and cutesy birds that chirp when you click on them. But ”pretty” isn’t everything, and even though Burdaloo does have some remarkable depth for a casual game, it falls short of being addictive. The player hardly ever faces any real danger; the worst penalty is a retry or a low score, which would be important only if you were competing against a friend.

And that’s another one of Burdaloo’s shortcomings. Most of my friends (male and female) said the chirping Burds became as annoying as the chirping of a million baby crickets. One pal described it as “too tropical,” referring to the surfer music and beach setting. Neither of us really cared about who had a better score; that can’t be a good sign.

I can’t say Burdaloo is a game I’ll to return to once this article is finished. If you’re looking for some less tropical Flash game fare, might I suggest browsing the games section at Newgrounds or trying Tactical Assassin or Deanimator.