Polarium (DS) - Review

Game Space | Review | Preview | Trailers | Interviews | Cheats


High:

Low:

Thank goodness for options! The first thing you might want to do, if you pick this title up, is turn the music off. It's really quite annoying. Polarium has four starting points once the credits for Nintendo and Mitchell have finished. A Challenge mode, Puzzle mode, Versus mode, and the Lounge.

The challenge mode presents you with three options. Challenge, Practice, and High Scores. The Challenge option puts you right into the action. You are presented with a easy puzzle of a number "one". Take your stylus and clear out the one symbol. Now a set of black or white blocks are going to fall. You have to clear them out and make them all white or all black. There is a timer, and more sets of black and white blocks will fall. Clear them out as more and more keep falling. There are 10 sections to pass and several different sets of blocks that fall which you have to keep clearing out. If you don't clear them, and they get backed up too much, then your game is over.

Practice lets you do the same thing but the game is not over when you get backed up. High Scores are done in a neat fashion. When you get one of three high scores, you are presented with a small writable square that you can scribble your initials into and save.

These are the options for the Challenge mode, but I want to talk more on the puzzle "Challenge" a little more. The sets that fall are usually 3 or 4 blocks high, and to clear them out you have to highlight the black or white squares to make as many rows the same color. In the game you are presented with a 3 dimensional box that blips around with your stylist as you highlight squares. This 3D square is not as responsive as the blocks you are highlighting. This was a major psychological aspect. I found myself waiting on the 3D box to catch up. This, however, is a bad idea. Your main objective is speed, and making more than one mistake can put you in a 'catch-up' state of mind, and make it very frustrating. I found that I was selecting adjacent squares that I didn't want selected, and was concerned about the responsiveness of the screen. On top of highlighting these squares to make each line a solid color, when your done drawing your highlighted line, you have to let up off the screen and tap the spot where you left off to complete it. This made me very concerned about my touch screen and its ability to withstand constant hits with the stylus. The challenge mode is very fast paced and most people would hit the screen hard after a while of playing in challenge to finish out the line in making.

Versus mode is fairly well set up in a easy to use fashion. You are presented with a link to tap on. "Versus" You hit this and your DS will wait for another to connect with you to start. Before you start a game you need to decide what you want to do. How many games will you and your opponent be playing? What time limit will you be using? These options are on the same screen as the "Versus" tappable link. Both screens are used for the Versus mode. You get the bottom screen as your opponents blocks are on the top. You start off with half a screen and you have to clear out your blocks before your opponent clears out theirs. Why? When you clear out lines going up and down, they are sent to your opponent for him to clear out.

The Lounge. It sounds so quaint doesn't it? Here you can do the Tutorial. The tutorial has 7 steps. Basic play of the blocks, touching, sliding, tiles and how they work, the outer frame, and what you can do with it. Black and white and Practice. The black and white step basically shows you a couple of techniques of clearing out black blocks for white.

One of the most valuable sections of this title is the "Settings" section. In the settings, you can erase the data, turn the backlight on or off, turn down the effects, sounds, or the most important feature of this title, turning off the music.

Another thing in the lounge is the "Wireless Link". Here, you can send a Polarium demo to those friends without the title, but with a Nintendo DS, so they can see all the fun they are missing out on, without you having to take the game out of your DS. For those friends that do have a Polarium, you can send and receive custom puzzles. The custom puzzles are in the Puzzle section.

The Puzzle Section has two options. "Puzzles" or "Edit". Puzzles put you in a section were you have to solve the puzzle. Make it all black or all white. And in some cases, half and half. There 100 stock puzzles and 100 empty slots for the self-created puzzles (more on this in a minute). With only 100 stock puzzles, once they are all done, that's it. You can however, go back and visit each puzzle that you have passed. The Stock puzzles are only revealed ten at a time.

There is a small arrow that lets you step scroll the puzzles by 50 at a time. Within this, you are presented with your 100 custom puzzle slots. In the edit section, you are presented with 50 out of 100 custom puzzle slots. Choose a number, and at the bottom you can click to enter a 30 digit password. Or, you can create a puzzle yourself. "But what about that Password thing," you say?

In the Create section you are presented with a square with a grey border and some buttons on the right. Your first thing to do is drag the box to the size you want it, then choose your tile puzzle design. Then, you have to pass your own puzzle for it to save. So you just cant go and make a puzzle with out first knowing how to solve it. One you have solved your new puzzle, you can now save it and share it with other owners of Polarium.

Simplistic and pleasant, but this is just a puzzle game, so do not expect to be wowed.

Luckily, the music can be shut off but the sound effects used for everything else were great for a puzzle game.

The layout and placement of everything looked well thought out. Puzzles were very easy to concentrate on, with out screen-distracting images.

Unless you have the internet to find custom puzzles, this is just a rental title.

Out of a hundred stock puzzles about ten were hard and another ten were mind numbing. The use of Polarium puzzles sites on the internet is a must for this title. With only one hundred stock puzzles, and a very frustrating Challenge mode.

Reviewed By:GyverX Reviewed On: Sun, 12 June 2005 01:49:42

::Comments Below Ad::

There are no comments attached to this item.

Post a new comment

BBCode Actions : Font color : Default Dark Red Red Orange Brown Yellow Green Olive Cyan Blue Dark Blue Indigo Violet White Black Font size : Tiny Small Normal Large Huge Close Tags

Name : Anonymous

Title: Comment:

Keywords :
Ratings 0 %

%