Over the years, the Milton Bradley game Connect 4 has proven to be timeless fun for anyone past the age of plastic pieces being a choking hazard. Sure, it may be little more than a glorified version of tic-tac-toe, but there's enough complexity involved to occupy you and a friend on a rainy afternoon, and it won't eat up a weekend like a game of Monopoly or Risk.
For anyone deprived as a child, here's how Connect 4 works: You and your opponent play with pieces of two different colors, and you take turns dropping pieces of your color one at a time into a vertical grid. The first player to get four pieces in a row (vertically, horizontally, or diagonally) wins.
One thing is immediately clear in the Palm Pre version of this game: The developers did not go above and beyond the call of duty. Assigned the task of making a cell phone version of Connect 4, they fulfilled their duty with as little flair as possible, ending up with something that does re-create the board game, but in a sterile and visually bland way.
The only graphics you'll encounter in the game are a start menu and a view of the board. Control input is limited to tapping where you want your chip to fall, and it works just fine. Tap the screen, see your chip drop, watch your opponent go, and so on. It's simple and effective.
The available gameplay modes are single-player, pass-and-play (which lets you take a turn and then hand your Pre over to your opponent to take his or her turn), and online multiplayer. In single-player mode, you can choose from three difficulty levels, but even the hardest one isn't all that difficult to beat. When you tap the online multiplayer option, the game tries to link you up with someone else looking to play at the same time. The longest it will wait is one minute, at which point the request times out, and you're booted back to the menu screen. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a Connect 4 online community at the time of this writing.
While the Pre version of the game may be wholly uninspired, there's a reason Connect 4 has stuck around all these years: It's a pretty fun game at its core. Like checkers, it's a simple game, but some strategies work better than others. At the same time, the Pre is a powerful little device that's capable of a whole lot more. The best you'll get from this game is a tiny fireworks animation that pops out of the winning line of chips at the end of a match.
Even though this version does a good job of reproducing the core gameplay of Connect 4, it's as basic a download as you're likely to find. It has enough gameplay for fans of the original game or players who aren't looking for much else--otherwise, there isn't much here to keep you around.
This review was provided by GameSpot mobile content partner SlideToPlay.com.
