New Software To Be Reviewed Review
Treasures of Montezuma 2: Treasurable? May be...
|
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Nice graphics and design, some new power-ups, really challenging.
Found it a bit too hard and there's no way of changing the difficulty level in the adventure mode, dialog-box type notifications during playing are annoying.
I'm a big fan of match-three games, and I try out everything that comes my way. Treasures of Montezuma 2 is from Alawar Games, and it's among their top 10 downloads. Starting out, it is exciting. It has three modes: adventure, endless and puzzle. In the adventure mode, you have to make fast matches within a given time-frame to destroy tiles to collect all the crystals that are bonded to them. If you finish collecting all the crystals within prize time, you earn gold coins to buy power-ups from the Town.
There's meter at the bottom that goes up and down according to the quickness of your matches. Once it hits the top (or the right side of the screen), it triggers the score frenzy mode where you can earn twice many gold coins for each match.
There will be tiles that are locked to their places, all iced up! You gotta bring them in a match to release them. These will generally contain the much needed crystals.
It kind of gets difficult when you have to collect 60 crystals within as short time as 5 minutes. That is what disturbs me most! If you fail to finish a level on time, you can't earn valuable coins to buy power-ups from the Town that will allow you to move to the next level. As a result, you end up playing previous levels to earn coins. Either way, the endless mode lets you do as many matches you want, so there's that option.
The power-ups can get interesting, including totems of different colors that are activated when you make the appropriate color match. If the next match is of the same color, the totems will shoot fireballs and what not to clear off some tiles! Then there are the detonation, color blast, bonus time, priceless time, etc. Some of these do as good as clearing up tiles of the same color on the board or destroy nearby tiles, or even increase the prize time by a certain percentage. As you progress and collect more coins, the power-ups become more and more interesting!
At the end of each super-level, there is a puzzle waiting for you. These are hidden object games, and I found them tremendously difficult. I had to invoke the hint option several times to complete even the first one.
There are so many awards to be earned. But when you earn one, the notification is shown in a dialog-box fashion on your gameboard. It's not even transparent, and it can really distract you from your time-constrained game.
The graphics are quite good, but conventional. Music is soothing and does go with the theme. There's no story telling about the so-called Treasures of Montezuma. So, it's just the gameplay.
In summary, it's a nice game, but probably too cliche to spend $9.95 on!
Treasures of Montezuma 2 by Alawar games is a very challenging but enjoyable match-three games. It has its shortcomings but I recommend giving it a try.