Puzzle League is fairly intuitive as a block-based puzzler. It is all about shifting similar blocks to make rows or columns of three which makes them vanish and awards you points. The series has been around for nearly 20 years and has been released under different brands (Panel de Pon, Tetris Attack, Pokémon Puzzle League etc).
Colored squares rise from the bottom of your screen and the game ends if they reach the top. You can only drag them horizontally in order to match up like-colored squares, so it plays out very much like Meteos. As the game progresses, the rate that the blocks fill increases. The game does take far too long to build up speed, and when it does; it jumps up far too much, giving the game a harsh difficulty curve.
You can gain combos by making successive matches with falling blocks. Planning/recognising these sequences is crucial to get the high scores in the main mode, although the game does often point them out even when a high difficulty has been set.
The game is played by tilting the DS on the side so you have a larger vertical view. There's an on-screen button to temporarily speed up the blocks, and is also mapped to the R trigger button.
There are many single-player modes contained within the game; Time Attack, Puzzle, Endless, Clear, Garbage Challenge, Vs Com. Additionally, you can play local multiplayer and Nintendo WFC was also available back in the day.
My favourite mode is Puzzle Mode where you have an assortment of blocks and you must remove them in a set amount of moves. There's a sub-mode within Puzzle Mode called Active Puzzle where a match is triggered, and you have to act quickly to move other blocks to create chains in order to remove all blocks. In general, Puzzle Mode is fun and is great training to learn how to spot combos to rack up the points in the other modes.
The game-play and content is good enough to recommend, but I feel my experience was mainly spoiled by playing Meteos prior to this. For me, Meteos was a much more interesting game when the levels offer different speed, visuals, block frequency, in addition to forcing you to create chains to actually remove the blocks.