New Software To Be Reviewed Review

Of all match-three games, Big Kahuna Reef 2 seemed a bit boring and repetitive in the beginning, until I realized that I could blast the whole board clean of tiles with nuke bombs!

The game is set in a marine environment, with symbols of shrimp, crabs, cannon balls, ship wheels and ducks filling the board. Sometimes they'll be chained to their position or locked with metal scaffolding. The object is to bring three or more of them in a row or column to clean them off. In the process, the wooden boxes behind the symbols get blasted. The whole board has to be cleared of the boxes. There are some levels where there will be whole lines of chained pieces, and making the right swap will trigger a huge splashdown of matched tiles and new tiles will flow down to the bottom!

When a match of five or more is made, you're awarded bombs, which can range from a single dynamite to a nuclear bomb, depending on how big a match you've made. These bombs, on double clicking or being swapped with a piece, can clear up huge portions of the game board. New tiles drop from above to fill up the voids. On completion of each level, you're allowed to put a new fish in your reef, which serves as the background of the gameboard. There are innumerable species of fish to choose from.

The game is not always very easy, because the shapes of the boards are not simple. There are odd corners which may be very difficult to clear, and in the timed mode you can only hope to get the right pieces in the right place. However, there is the relaxed mode, where you can make the matches slowly with strategy. When you make fast matches, a Tiki rises up on the right side, the maximum height of which determines the bonus points you are rewarded at the end.

The board graphics are quite conventional. What I loved, though, are the natural-looking animated fish swimming around in the reef. They give a feeling of peacefulness! There aren't very many cons, except that some levels can be ridiculously hard to finish, and you may have to trade in 'lives' out of the initial 4 you're given, for valuable time, or start over the level again. The fish net allows you to take out odd pieces to help you make matches, but I didn't really find it very useful in the timed mode, because it's difficult to spot the best piece to remove. It might be different in the relaxed mode.

Big Kahuna 2: Chain Reaction is a great match-three game from Reflexive Entertainment, with a modest price-tag, and lots of exciting explosions that you can only relish on a virtual reef!