Power Rangers Games

Jigsaws and memory boards built from team portraits.

Power Rangers Color Fall - Pin Pull - Puzzle Game

Power Rangers Match 3 Puzzle

Power Rangers Memory Matching - Brain Puzzle Game

Power Rangers Bubble Shoot Puzzle

Morph, fight, repeat

Five teenagers in color-coded suits, a monster of the week and a giant robot for the finale: the formula has been running on television for decades, and it maps onto games unusually well. The titles on this page are fan-made and inspired games from licensed providers, not official products of the franchise's owners, and nothing here claims affiliation with or endorsement by them. What they borrow is the shape of the show. A ranger runs across a side-scrolling stage, punches and kicks through foot soldiers, meets a boss, and somewhere in the level the fight scales up to a robot the size of a building. The colors do a lot of the work: pick red for the leader, blue for the brains, pink or yellow for the fast one, and the game hands you the matching suit. Most rounds are short, controls are a handful of keys or an on-screen pad, and losing just restarts the stage.

The brawlers are the heart of the shelf and they play like the rest of the fighting games hub: a move key, an attack key, a jump and a special that charges over the round. Several pit two rangers against each other on one keyboard, which lands them under two player games as well. The runner and platform titles take the same characters and replace the fight with a course of jumps and traps, closer to a platformer games shelf title in a spandex suit. And the robot finales, when a game bothers to include them, turn into a slower, heavier duel between two towering machines, which is why the robot games hub is the natural neighbor for the players who came for the mech rather than the team.

Categories:2 PlayerPlatformer

Puzzles, coloring and the quiet half of the shelf

Almost half the titles are not action games at all. Jigsaw puzzles cut a team portrait into pieces and ask you to reassemble it, with the piece count set by difficulty; the jigsaw games hub has the same mechanic with every other picture in the catalog. Memory boards hide pairs of ranger faces under cards and reward a player who remembers where the blue one went, a pattern shared with the whole memory games shelf. Coloring pages give you the line art of a helmet or a robot and a palette to fill it with, and since the suits are famous for their colors, getting them right or deliberately wrong is half the fun. These are the titles to hand a younger child, because nothing in them moves faster than a mouse cursor and nothing can be lost.

Dress-up and creator titles round the set out, letting you assemble a ranger from a helmet, a chest plate and a weapon, and they sit naturally beside the dress-up games shelf even though the audience skews differently. A couple of trivia and spot-the-difference games test how well you know the team. Taken together the quiet half turns the page into something for a whole household: an older child on the brawler, a younger one on the coloring page, both wearing the same colors. Players who like the hero idea more than this particular team should try the hero games hub, which gathers every caped and masked champion in the catalog, and the ninja games hub for the martial-arts side of the same fantasy.

Categories:MemoryDress Up

Controls, age and where to go next

The fighters and runners want a keyboard: arrows or WASD to move, a couple of letter keys to strike, space to jump, and the start screen always says which. On a phone the same games draw a pad on the screen, and they are playable but tighter; the puzzles and coloring pages, on the other hand, are better on a touchscreen than with a mouse. Nothing installs and nothing needs a sign-in. The action titles carry cartoon fighting with no blood, in line with the show they draw from, so the shelf is generally fine for the same age that watches it. A parent choosing for a very young child will find the coloring, jigsaw and memory titles the safest bets, and the brawlers a good fit for early school age upward, once a few keys at once stops feeling like a lot to remember.

Sessions run short by design. A brawler stage takes a minute or two, a jigsaw as long as you want, a memory board a few minutes, which makes the shelf good for a break rather than an evening. If the team-of-heroes fantasy is what pulls you in, the action games hub is the wide shelf with hundreds of side-scrolling fights that owe something to the same tradition, and the kids games hub has more of the puzzle-and-color type across every theme. The dinosaur-flavored seasons of the show have their own fans, and the dinosaur games hub carries that idea without the suits, from runners to puzzles to the occasional giant robot stomping through a city, and it is the obvious next page for a fan of those seasons.

Categories:Action