World of Warcraft Peggle

In a moment of boredom yesterday, I decided to give the trial World of Warcraft Edition of PopCap's Peggle game a try. I have never played the original Peggle and likely never will, but I do tend to enjoy PopCap's games so I figured it was worth a shot. You can download the free trial of Peggle: World of Warcraft Edition here.

The concept of Peggle is relatively simple. You take a limited number of ball bearings and pop them one by one out of a chute at the top of the screen which you can aim left and right. Scattered about the play field below are little "pegs" which your ball will light up and bounce off of. Once your ball drops off the bottom of the screen, the pegs you activated disappear and you continue playing until you run out of balls or you erase all the red pegs on the level. There are special pegs strewn about with game altering effects and both completion and high score chasing keep you coming back for more. The end effect is something of a hybrid between pinball, Arcanoid, and a pachinko machine.

The free download lets you roll through ten full levels of peg clearing goodness and is certainly worth a look. The Blizzard artwork is nice, but if you expect the World of Warcraft tie in to be anything but cosmetic, you might be disappointed. The "story" is atrocious, but the game did not really need a story in the first place. The game's aesthetics are enjoyable especially the super slow mo that kicks on when you are gunning for the last peg and the over the top ending sequence. One or two of the levels err a bit on the side of frustrating (stupid goblin airship....), but most play well. Also, though the pin locations on each level are set, the assortment of red, generic, and specialty pins is randomized so there is some replay value.

If you are like me, it will be unlikely you will get much more than an hour of play out of Peggle: World of Warcraft Edition, but that is certainly enough to warrant paying the download's $0.00 price tag. Even if you do not enjoy WoW Peggle, if the game draws a lot of traffic it may spur future collaberations between Blizzard and PopCap and that can be nothing but a good thing.