It plays exactly like the original.
Well, it's like Hexic. That's obvious. Now, having played Hexic HD (the Xbox 360 version), I'm only inclined to compare the two games.
It with a different tone. Bright, fluffy colors instead of the gritty dark and bold colors The soundtrack is at least softer, and not that mindless weirdness that Hexic HD had. Heck, I actually prefer this color scheme to the Hexic HD one-but then again, I see that screens of the original Hexic shares the bright pastel colors as your game.
I suppose you have the concept of winning in the same fashion-by forming power flowers (black pearls in the original) from sunflowers (silver stars). The win condition seems different, as if I remember correctly, you only need to make a trio of the black pearls in Hexic HD.
I don't know if you left that ridiculous function where matching three of them eliminates all of them. (This was the most frustrating feature of Hexic HD-to build up a few stars that are required to win the game, only to see three of them disappear before my eyes). And then, there's the fact that in Hexic HD, (even on the easiest setting) even more color tiles appear in later levels, making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to form any silver stars, let alone, match colors up to the similarly colored bomb (ladybug in this game) in time.
As the trial ends after three levels, if you did get rid of those two "features" of the original, it would have made the game much more player friendly, I'd be automatically inclined to say that this is the superior version. Too bad I didn't play far enough.
It's not a full-on clone, as it manages to lack the one mode that I actually liked the best from the original-Survival Mode. Where you attempt to clear as much of the board as you can (blocks don't automatically fill in just yet, and the pieces left on the board are immovable when the new blocks come in.
I clicked on the link after the trial ended, just to see the rates. I suppose you do throw in a bunch of other games along with this, but personally, I feel it's not worth it. I suppose it's if someone didn't want to buy an Xbox 360 with any hard drive (I won't say it comes for "free" on the X360, as the customer did already plop a lumpsum of cash for the bundle) and that person is a puzzle fan, (and lastly, that person is someone like me who isn't willing to even touch Internet Explorer just to play it on MSN live) then I suppose it makes sense to get it.
But there's so many "if's" here that it's probably not profitable to sell by itself.
That, and the fact that a lot of people hate trial versions of games on Newgrounds.