Spire Blast

This matching puzzler may be simple to play, but its destructive flair for smashing towers apart will keep you coming back for another round. Spire Blast presents the standard color matching puzzle game in a whole new light by taking your targets and placing them as the literal building blocks of gigantic towers that climb into the sky. Your initial task is simply to bring the tower crashing down: Aim carefully to remove supporting bricks, and once you've caused enough damage, support beams and platforms will tumble to the ground. Even better, depending on the angle you toss your orbs, you can impart momentum, causing stacks of blocks to fall and cascade into other columns. This can be incredibly satisfying, especially when a well-placed shot destroys multiple levels of the tower you're working on, and you hear the lumber and other debris from the structure fall to the ground. But you can't simply raze every tower in the same way. The challenge comes when the game starts asking you to fulfill certain conditions before moving to the next stage, such as feeding blocks to a dragon, avoiding shields that repel incoming shots, or releasing iron bars on blocks. You'll have to be tactically accurate with these conditions, because any bricks that fall to the ground are lost. That might mean that you have to take a slower approach to clearing some objectives before unleashing the slab spilling chaos.

Even with a slower approach to things, you'll probably find that Spire Blast is an easier matching game than other puzzlers. Part of that is because of the ample number of coins you receive for power-ups to make clearing blocks simpler, and part of it is because Apple Arcade lets you replay missions without any restrictions. That makes it easier to fly through the initial 80 levels of the game and be eagerly left waiting for more. But if you're looking for a fun, temporary diversion of puzzle solving and brick busting, Spire Blast will amuse you for a while.