Reviewed: February 30, 2008
Reviewed by: Jason Porter

Publisher
MumboJumbo

Developer
MumboJumbo

Released: November 20, 2007
Genre: Puzzle
Players: 1

7
5
5
7
6.0

Supported Features:

Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)

NO SCREENS AVAILABLE

"Is it video poker?" I asked, leaning forward.

"No, Bejeweled," a friend replied happily, mashing on the controls.

Sure enough, the little boxy machine that looked exactly like a video poker game wasn't about winning money at all, just scoring points. And the games--which, along with the mega-famous Bejeweled, included simple matching, skill and blind-luck contests of various sorts--proved to be addictive not only to my friends, but a number of other people who came by and fed coins into it as we enjoyed our greasy entrees. I had never seen such a thing, but it made me sit up and take notice. These games were simpler than Pac-Man, and yet people were more than happy to pay money to play them!

As I now know quite well, so-called "casual" games are not only highly popular with non-traditional gaming demographics (like truckers and housewives), but easy to produce as well, making them a lucrative bet for developers. Although I haven't been back to any truck stops since I moved away, I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see at least one of the Luxor games available for play on such a machine.

Luxor: Pharaoh's Challenge is a color-matching game that is, like many of its spiritual brethren, surprisingly addictive, considering how simple it is to get the hang of. Colored spheres roll along a winding track in sets of roughly 30 spheres to a train (each stage has several such trains that appear at staggered intervals). At the bottom of the screen, the player controls a golden, winged Egyptian artifact that loads more colored spheres one at a time, as in the Bust-A-Move series of games. Instead of angling a trajectory, though, the shooter slides back and forth across the bottom of the screen. When a player feels she has the perfect shot to make a group of three or more spheres of the same color, she pushes a button to shoot the ball up the screen towards the moving train.

The fact that each train of spheres is moving adds to the excitement of the game. If any spheres reach the end of the track (represented by a little pyramid with a gateway in one side), the round is lost and the player is urged to try again. And if a ball isn't shot into a set of two or more spheres of the same color, it wedges itself into the train, making it that much longer. This can sometimes work to a player's advantage, though: if three blue spheres are separated from six blue spheres by a lone red sphere, wedging another red sphere in beside the first means that the next red sphere can be used to clear all three of them, allowing a combo chain to occur when the two groups of blue spheres run into each other afterwards. Combo chains rack up big points, which is, of course, the sole purpose of playing Luxor. It's fun and satisfying to trigger a chain, and sometimes such chains can string along four, five or even six reactions, which is quite a rush.

The game's 88 stages are divided up into levels with a handful of stages each, and at the end of each level, a new Blessing is unlocked. Blessings are "equipped" between levels via a simple interface and have various effects, from making balls fire more quickly to increasing the range from which bonus point items (which drop from cleared spheres when certain conditions are met) will be sucked towards the shooter for easy capture. Their effects are permanent as long as they are equipped, and up to three can be equipped at once. More powerful in their immediate effects are the in-stage power-ups, which, like bonus point items, drop when certain things happen. Each power-up has an effect which lasts for the next shot only, but the effects are big enough that a well-placed power-up can reverse the fortunes of the unlucky. The most basic is the Wild Ball, which is guaranteed to match with whatever spheres it touches, even if it's wedged between two different-colored spheres. It can be very useful for clearing such spots, leaving wider, uninterrupted chains of spheres for easy removal. Other power-ups include Bombs, Lightning Storms (which selectively destroy a number of spheres at random, often triggering chains between the spheres left) and many more.

In the end, although the game is fun on the merits of its basic gameplay alone, it is the lack of much variety that keeps it from scoring higher in this section of the review. There are 88 stages, according to the game box, but there are only 25 different layouts, which are repeated at higher difficulty settings as the main gameplay mode is worked through. This means that less than an hour into the game, players will see the same scenery begin to repeat. Furthermore, aside from the standard three difficulty levels most puzzle games come with these days, there are only two gameplay modes. The regular "story" mode runs the gamut of every stage, from easiest to most difficult. As stages are played through, they then become unlocked for play in the "Endless Tomb" mode, which just means one level with a never-ending, increasingly difficult procession of sphere chains. If a few more modes were available, this game could have been twice as much fun as it already is.

Aside from the cool rolling-stone sound I just described, there are sounds for shooting balls, catching points and power-ups, and a neat wolf howl whenever a combo is accomplished, but that's really about it. Similarly, the soundtrack, while by no means bad, is nondescript. Each song fades into the next one, and none of the mystical, Egyptian-themed pieces stand out from each other. In the end, though, who plays a game like this for its soundtrack? Not every puzzle game can be Tetris, after all.