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What’s great about Planet Puzzle League on the DS is how much easier chaining combos becomes with the added use of the stylus. On previous versions of Panel de Pon, if you needed to quickly get a block from one side of the playing field to the other, you’d have to alternate between pressing A and left or right on the D-pad at a blistering fast speed to get the block to where you needed it to be in time.

However, now with the DS, it’s just a matter of quickly swiping your stylus across the row. If for some reason you’d prefer button controls over stylus, the game gives you that option as well. It even lets you decide which way you want to hold the DS. If you hold it vertically (ala Brain Age), it makes it awkward to control using the buttons, but the blocks are bigger making it easier to use your stylus. On the other hand if you hold it horizontally, the blocks are smaller but playing with the buttons feels much more natural than it would with the vertical grip.

While the best part about Planet Puzzle League is going head to head against your friends in Vs. Mode, the single player game features a bevy of modes that cover pretty much every aspect of the game. You’ve got your usual Endless/Marathon Mode, Vs. Com mode, Time Attack, etc. If you’re familiar with Tetris Attack or Pokemon Puzzle League, you should be well acquainted with all of the various single player modes in Planet Puzzle League.

What deserves special mention, however, is the Puzzle Mode which consists of basic puzzles, advanced puzzles, missions, and active puzzles. Basic and Advanced puzzles are probably the ones that you would expect from a game like this. You have a set pattern of blocks in front of you and it’s your job to clear them by only moving a certain number of blocks. In mission mode, again you are given a specific pattern of blocks, but this time you are told to clear them in a specific way.

Sometimes it will ask you to arrange the blocks so that you clear them in an L shape, other missions might have arrange the blocks so you can make a 15 block combo, and some might even just give you a huge mass of blocks and just say to clear them all with no strings attached. Finally, there are the Active Puzzles, which will probably do the most for improving your skill at the actual game.

An active puzzle will begin with a countdown and three blocks being lined up. Once the countdown reaches zero, the three blocks will disappear and you will have to work as fast as you can to chain combos together in order to get rid of all of the other blocks on the screen. Each mode comes with 60 puzzles for a total of 240 puzzles for you to wrap your brain around. That’s almost an entire separate game right there!