Bejeweled is a classic game that was originally released in 2001 by PopCap games. Since that time it has been ported over to every platform imaginable and enjoyed by millions. The webOS version is known as Swap & Drop by Biocandy Productions. If you enjoy Bejeweled, then you will find this game a nice, if basic, implementation of the classic.

For those of you who have never played the original, the goal is to line up 3 or more “jewels” (or in this case icons) to increase your score. The longer the line, the more points you get. In Swap & Drop, you have basically two modes you can play with. Freeplay allows you to play as long as there are viable moves on the board. Because of the random nature of the game, this can be as few as five or so moves all the way to several dozen. The other game mode is called Blitz. This is exactly the same game except that you only have 60 seconds to get the highest score possible.

While playing the game there were two things that stuck out at me. First and foremost, the game doesn’t have very much personality. The two options you have for game pieces are standard Palm icons or web 2.0 badges (facebook, google, rss, etc.). This makes the game seem very generic. Now from a gameplay perspective this means absolutely nothing, but from a consumer perspective it makes a big difference. Games like this are set apart by their art style. If you don’t have one, then it really hurts the ability to separate from the pack.

The other thing that stood out to me is that there isn’t much variety to the game. As I have mentioned before, I like my phone games to be simple, but the problem I ran into here was there just isn’t much meat on these bones. You get the two aforementioned game modes and you can change the size of your board. There aren’t any challenges, levels, special jewels, or anything else that would give the game some extra oomph.

Now, to be fair, I didn’t mention this in my reviews of Checkers or Match ‘Em, so the question is why am I picking on poor Swap & Drop? I think it boils down to the fact that those apps are based in real world games that haven’t changed much in the upteen thousand years that we have been playing them. Memory and Checkers are basically the same as they have always been…Bejeweled changes all the time and adds new stuff with each iteration. So when virtually all of that stuff is missing in a new version, it is more noticeable.