Card Drop is the first iPhone exclusive game from Kuyi Mobile, but these guys are no strangers to the mobile industry.  For years they turned out top notch games for the Pocket PC and Palm platforms as eSoft Interactive, and Card Drop proves two things: their talent certainly transcends the platforms the develop for, and they are just as good at making quick pick up and play games as they are at their more in depth endeavors.  Card Drop takes the game of Solitaire and actually makes it worth playing.

Cards Just Keep Falling

In reality, the only thing that Card Drop has in common with solitaire is that you’re trying to stack cards in order on various piles.  In Card Drop there are only 4 piles, however.  You also don’t have to worry about suit.  All you care about is the value of the card.  Even better, you can go both directions – if the top card on a pile is a 9, you can play either a 10 or an 8.  There’s a timer bar on the left side of the screen that’s continually emptying.  When the bar is completely empty the game is over.  As stacks of cards get cleared, however, some time gets added back to the bar.

That brings us to the best part of the game.  The four stacks that you are trying to add the cards to are constantly moving!  At the very bottom of the screen are the four piles that you can play from.  A card will start falling in each column, and will keep going until they are hidden behind the playable piles at the bottom of the screen.  Up until you pass on a stack or the stack has been officially added to your score you can keep adding cards to it.  That means that if you’re really quick, sometimes you can add a card to a stack when it’s barely visible above the bottom of the screen.

To play a card you simply drag it from a pile to a stack.  I wish this would have been relaxed just a bit, such that as long as you released it in a column where it was appropriate it would be added to the stack.  Sometimes I’d miss adding a card to a stack simply because it wasn’t in the right position when I let go of it.  At times this game gets frantic enough that such a nit pick can be annoying.  The other main interaction with the game is that you can “pass” on a stack by clicking on the appropriate column.  This will cause the stack to descend quickly and you won’t be able to add anything to it.  The bad part about this is that if you think you’re dragging a card from your play pile but you’re not, when you let up on a column it acts as though you’ve clicked the column and passes on that stack.  You just need to pay real close attention to what you’re doing.

The graphics are nothing special, but they’re clean and solid and serve their purpose well.  I do like the background, which looks like a pattern you might expect to see on the carpet of a casino.  The sound effects are decent, though the “chime” played when you finally lose is actually kind of annoying and disrupts the otherwise peaceful music.  The music actually sounds like something you might hear playing in the background as you’re wandering the casino floor.

Other than some sensitivity issues with the controls, I found Card Drop to be quite an enjoyable experience.  The music is actually somewhat soothing, the action is just the right pace, and with several achievements to unlock and online high scores, there will always be some competition to beat if you so desire.  If you’re looking for a game to play for a few minutes at a time when you don’t want to delve into some of your heavy-thinking alternatives, Card Drop would be just right for you.

Final Verdict: Recommended
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