After playing Colorbs for a few minutes and going back to the home screen of my iPhone, everything looked so much more boxy that I thought Apple had done a stealth UI update or something. That is probably the most interesting thing I can say about Colorbs (Free), a very minimalistic puzzle game from One Minute Games, who previously brought us the well-liked Commander Pixman ($3.99). The game pulls in elements from many staples of the genre such as Puyo Puyo and Panel de Pon to create something mostly familiar but with a few little twists to set it apart. It’s all packaged up in a terribly bland presentation that leaves the game feeling just a little bit too lifeless.

Colorbs is a slight variation on the falling block sub-genre of puzzle games. The pieces are colored circles, and you have to try to match them in groups of three by moving a row horizontally. Every time you move a row, more circles will fall from the top of the screen. If the stacked pieces go off the top of the play area, you lose. As you play, special pieces will appear, with the most important being circles with numbers in them. Each time you make a move, the number will count down by one, and when it reaches zero, the circle becomes an unmatchable black orb. It’s important to place priority on clearing these circles before that happens, but it’s not long before you have several on-screen at once. You’ll have to use your judgment to make some sacrifices at that point. The only way to remove black pieces is using a different kind of special piece, but you really can’t count on them appearing often enough to help you keep a lid on things. The other special pieces tend to be to your benefit, although the chameleon piece that changes colors each turn can go either way.

Ultimately, you’re playing for score, with a Game Center leaderboard included and your own local high score featuring prominently on the play field at all times. Under your score, however, a bar fills up as you make matches. When that bar fills up completely, you go up a level, increasing the points payout and the difficulty in kind. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed as the game adds more colors into the mix, so you have to carefully plan chain combos well in advance to keep the stack down. Even with pretty good planning, the game can still sometimes deal a devastating blow to you with its random spilling of circles. I had many games where I was managing my stacks well and keeping everything fairly low, only to have the game decide to drop a bunch of different colors into a single column without giving me a chance to deal with them.

That sort of boom-you’re-dead situation is just one of the ways Colorbs feels not quite ready for prime time. The presentation is extremely spartan, with no music, minimal sound effects, and the visuals being not much more than flat-shaded circles on a white background. The circles fall into the play area with a little animation and a sound effect, and when you score combos, the game will toss the occasional comment on screen to praise you. It seems to aim for being functional with little aim towards also being stylish, but unfortunately, it fails in the former as well. When you are making a puzzle game about matching colored pieces, one of the very highest priorities should be testing it with a colorblind player. It doesn’t seem like that happened here, so those of you who are colorblind will definitely want to steer clear.

Colorbs is enjoyable enough at its core, but it ultimately just leaves me wanting. I’m not quite sure if that’s simply down to its presentation expressing virtually no personality, or if it’s something deeper with the way the difficulty roller coaster works. Whatever the case, there’s just not enough here to separate it from the crowd, especially the many top-tier efforts sitting around the same price point. It’s a decent enough idea, but it’s nowhere near fully-formed, and the end result is sadly just another forgettable puzzle game.