Luxor: Wrath of Set
Puzzlingly overpriced.
Published: January 4, 2007
Casual gaming is one of the most bandied-about terms at games industry trade shows these days, and for very good reason: it's an almost untapped, constant stream of cash with a massive potential fanbase. How many moms and dads do you know that have spent time playing those free Flash-based games on sites like Shockwave or Yahoo's games portal. Now just imagine those games being made by just a few people and it doesn't take much to make back the costs of development even at a dirt cheap price. Factor in the downloadable aspect of the new PlayStation Network and you can see why Sony is so keen on pulling in the casual market.
But there's a dark side to such a budding industry. Blatant, some would say shameless, rip-offs of entire game concepts aren't just likely, they're near-commonplace. Case in point: Luxor: Wrath of Set, which is the spitting image of Zuma, which in turn bites the style off Puzz Loop. What's weird is that nobody seems to care, and thus we are stuck with what is certainly a competent copy of a game that's already seen a couple of imitators. The problem isn't that the game itself is bad, it's that you'll have to drop $20 on a game that really isn't much more than the already free versions you can play online right now.
It's not a far-flung or difficult to understand concept; a handful of colored jewels roll along snaking channels while the player fires pre-selected colors up at the track in an effort to nest three of a color together, at which point all connected colors disappear. The snake of colors will always pull back together, so there are opportunities for combos, and big sets of color eliminations will cause special power-ups or treasures to pop out of the track that the player must catch. Simple, no?
And it's fun, sure, pulled together with a nice Egyptian touch and a set of checkpoints to the levels and level names that give you a place to pick up from if you need to continue. Is it deep? Hell no, what you see at the start is what you'll play through till the end. You might have to deal with obstructions, the lines might move faster, but honestly, the concept is easy to learn, and... well, fairly easy to master too. Worse still, if you already blew a ton of productivity on Zuma or, if you're really hardcore Puzz Loop, you're not going to have much trouble here.
The presentation is just as basic, you'll hear the clack of the marble-like jewels, and some chimes and explosions while bopping through fittingly themed music, but the audio, like the visuals, which ape the whole pyramid-raiding idea nicely enough, is really just minor tweaks that never get past the starting point. In fact, the visuals are really little more than new channels (and some of the levels are actually recycled). In all, the game never feels like it's going anywhere.
Kinda like this review, right? Yeah, that might be because the game is exactly what it is from the first five minutes all the way through to the end. That might work for a $5 online download (and, like publisher Mumbo Jumbo's other project Platypus, this might actually have been one of those casual games that worked as a PS3/PSP download), but as a $20 game -- which is $10 less than it started at -- there's just not enough here to make anyone feel like they're getting their money's worth.
Blame all them cheapy clones or blame the fact that a demo with randomized levels would essentially provide the same amount of depth (no, Survival and Time Attack Modes don't count). Whatever the reason, this is a definite pass, even for those casual game junkies out there.
But there's a dark side to such a budding industry. Blatant, some would say shameless, rip-offs of entire game concepts aren't just likely, they're near-commonplace. Case in point: Luxor: Wrath of Set, which is the spitting image of Zuma, which in turn bites the style off Puzz Loop. What's weird is that nobody seems to care, and thus we are stuck with what is certainly a competent copy of a game that's already seen a couple of imitators. The problem isn't that the game itself is bad, it's that you'll have to drop $20 on a game that really isn't much more than the already free versions you can play online right now.
It's not a far-flung or difficult to understand concept; a handful of colored jewels roll along snaking channels while the player fires pre-selected colors up at the track in an effort to nest three of a color together, at which point all connected colors disappear. The snake of colors will always pull back together, so there are opportunities for combos, and big sets of color eliminations will cause special power-ups or treasures to pop out of the track that the player must catch. Simple, no?
And it's fun, sure, pulled together with a nice Egyptian touch and a set of checkpoints to the levels and level names that give you a place to pick up from if you need to continue. Is it deep? Hell no, what you see at the start is what you'll play through till the end. You might have to deal with obstructions, the lines might move faster, but honestly, the concept is easy to learn, and... well, fairly easy to master too. Worse still, if you already blew a ton of productivity on Zuma or, if you're really hardcore Puzz Loop, you're not going to have much trouble here.
The presentation is just as basic, you'll hear the clack of the marble-like jewels, and some chimes and explosions while bopping through fittingly themed music, but the audio, like the visuals, which ape the whole pyramid-raiding idea nicely enough, is really just minor tweaks that never get past the starting point. In fact, the visuals are really little more than new channels (and some of the levels are actually recycled). In all, the game never feels like it's going anywhere.
Kinda like this review, right? Yeah, that might be because the game is exactly what it is from the first five minutes all the way through to the end. That might work for a $5 online download (and, like publisher Mumbo Jumbo's other project Platypus, this might actually have been one of those casual games that worked as a PS3/PSP download), but as a $20 game -- which is $10 less than it started at -- there's just not enough here to make anyone feel like they're getting their money's worth.
Blame all them cheapy clones or blame the fact that a demo with randomized levels would essentially provide the same amount of depth (no, Survival and Time Attack Modes don't count). Whatever the reason, this is a definite pass, even for those casual game junkies out there.
