Editor's Review
Drag a shape onto the grid, fill a row, watch it vanish. Block Blast! is that loop and almost nothing else, which is precisely why it has passed a billion installs and holds a 4.85 average — one of the highest ratings you will find on a game at this scale.
The board is eight squares by eight. Three pieces are offered at a time and all three must be placed before a new set appears, and that single rule carries the whole difficulty curve. There is no timer and no falling speed, just the slow arithmetic of leaving yourself room. Clearing several lines in one move builds a combo multiplier, and hunting those multipliers is the difference between a score of two thousand and a score of twenty.
HungryStudio keeps it free and funds it with advertising. Interstitials appear between runs, and rewarded videos offer an extra life or a piece swap once you have painted yourself into a corner. They come often enough to notice across a long session. There is also no way to make the board harder or the pieces smarter after you have internalised the pattern, so practised players reach a plateau where every run starts to feel like the last one.
As something to fill four minutes in a queue, though, very few things are tuned this well.
Features
Eight-by-eight grid with three pieces offered per turn
Combo scoring for clearing several lines at once
No timer, so a run lasts as long as your board does
Rewarded videos for an extra life or a piece swap
Playable without a network connection, ads aside
Pros
The rules take about five seconds to learn
Sessions stretch from one minute to an hour
Free, with no purchase needed to keep playing
A 4.85 average across an enormous player base
Cons
Interstitial ads between runs get repetitive
No difficulty settings, so skilled players plateau
Rewarded-video revives blur the line between skill and patience
