Push & Pop is a new puzzle game for the iOS and Android platforms by Rocky Hong. This is one of those “zen” puzzle games that challenges you to get the highest score possible, and while it’s never overtly frustrating or difficult on the surface, the game gets tougher and tougher as your board gets more crowded, and you compete against other players for a high score. Read on for some tips and tricks for Push & Pop!
As you move around, your main method of progressing forward is to match lines, just like in Tetris. So you’ll be able to match lines of 5, and then the blocks will disappear, and will be replaced with blue gems instead. Collect the gems for points – each blue gem collected is one point earned in the round. The lines themselves don’t earn you points.
There are two ways to collect the gems. You can either run right over them with your character, or you can push a block into it, which is primarily done if you can’t get to the blocks. So when you make gems by clearing lines, don’t worry if you can’t get to them right away, as you will almost always be able to get to them via block-pushing.
Your graphical quality will be decided before you play the game, by the specs on your phone. You can override this setting by going to the settings menu, though. Tap on the button that says “auto” and you’ll change the graphical quality. HQ means high quality, MQ means medium quality, and LQ means low quality. The lower the quality, the more battery life and less lag that you experience.
As you move around the board, blocks will randomly appear. Often these blocks will save your bacon, because they’ll appear in that one empty block in a row of four filled blocks, and end up clearing out the line. Some of them will be two-story blocks which will clear out in the same way; when they do clear, the top block will fall down to the bottom, and will be glowing. When you run over it, you’ll clear out two lines perpendicular to each other, and end up with a lot more space on the board.
Above all, to maximize your score, keep the most space around your character as possible. Put yourself into too many needlessly risky situations, and they’ll end up coming back to bite you too early, and you won’t even make it to 100 points. Keep space around you, and it will be easy to top 100, 200, and more points.