As a huge Bejeweled fan, I was looking forward to playing Galaxy Gems, a similar flash game in which you click and drag “spaceship refueling” gems into rows or columns of three gems or more.

Your goal in each level is to destroy enough refueling gems to fill up the bar to the right of the gem board. Once the bar is full, your spaceship can take off and you will be brought back to the galaxy page, where you can choose to move on to the next planet or play old levels again. Blast gems are created by combining four or more gems in a line, and they can be activated by clicking on them. Depending on what type of blast gem it is (there are 4 different kinds), gems in different areas will be destroyed. For example, clicking on blast gems that have a line on them would destroy the entire row or column of gems that the blast gem was in.

As much as I love mixing and matching gems, this game is basically a copy of Bejeweled in everything but the name and the outer space setting. While that is fine and dandy in many ways, it also means that Galaxy Gems has the same cons as Bejewled has, and perhaps even more. There is no time limit for every level, so there really is no “difficulty” factor. Also, the game doesn’t tell you if you run out of possible swaps in a given level, so you’re stuck either staring at a level for a long time trying to look for a nonexistent swap or you give up and go back to the home page to play the level again.

The “clicking and dragging” component of the game wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked it to be, and sometimes caused the gems to be temporarily stuck. Graphics-wise, Galaxy Gems is far less flashy and sophisticated than Bejeweled Blitz (popular on Facebook), partially since the power-ups / blast gems don’t cause exciting animations or colorful explosions to occur. Also, performing combos only causes the words “Impressive!”, “Awesome!”, or “Incredible!” to appear on the screen for a short time. Unlike in the Bejeweled games, there is no “hint” button…which is both good (in that you won’t ever be able to “cheat”) and bad (”URGHHH, I’m stuck and I can’t do anything about it”).

Final verdict? I give Galaxy Gems a 4.5/10 since it’s a boring but decent copy of Bejeweled. I still wouldn’t play it again, though, especially since there’s a better and more exciting version of a ‘matching gems’ game out there in the form of Bejeweled Blitz.

You can play Galaxy Gems for free here!