Review of Jewel Link Chronicles: Legend of Athena

So for the last few weeks I haven taken the Nintendo DS to bed each night and played 


Jewel Link Chronicles: Legend of Athena (the third instalment in the chronicles, the others being Cradle of Rome and Candle of Egypt.

I say a few weeks as it's quite a long game.... although most puzzle game are long to be honest, which is the way games should be - especially those for handheld devices. 


The game itself is a match 3  game where you must swap adjacent tiles so that rows of three or more of the same symbols emerge. By doing this, you will collect food, building resources, jewels and gold, as well as magical artefacts to help you in your mission.


You play through stages of the game against the clock  - you have to play it this way otherwise it doesn't really become a challenge. 


The aim of the game is to rebuild Ancient Greece at the foot of the Acropolis.  In order to do this you  must acquire enough food, resources and money. This is done by completely various levels within in stage... the final level of each stage requires you to defeat a beast of a mythical nature, this is still a match 3 puzzle however you must match and remove a certain number of tiles which contain an image of the beast or threat.


By defeating the 'beast' puzzle you will be rewarded by receiving the blueprints to a building - this is where the puzzle style changes. The blueprint puzzle is a slider puzzler - you must move the tiles into to the correct place in order for the blueprint to be read correctly and the building to be built by the master builders that are helping you rebuild Ancient Greece. 


The twist to this game (apart from the slider puzzles) is the use of special 'icon power up' tiles  - by collecting enough of these you gain the 'power up' which could be a row removal bomb for instance - which removes a  whole row of tiles for you. Without the help of these power ups you'll never complete the game - certainly not in the latter levels.


As puzzle games go, this is no 'bejeweled' although it is just as challenging to be honest. What let's this game down is the quality of the graphics and the very 'long' repetitive nature of the game. On some of the levels the graphics made it hard to differentiate some of the tiles and therefore made the level frustrating to play.


Also on the review game I  was playing when you switched to 'relaxed mode', which is supposedly an untimed mode, the timer still reduced and therefore my six year old daughter was unable to play as she kept running out of time. 


Conclusion:


If you're looking for an exciting, bright, colourful game then maybe something else would suit you a little better. However, if you're an avid puzzle game fan and are particularly fond of 'match 3' games then this should be added to your collection.  As I said it's a long game, with 100 levels, so you certainly get your 
money's worth of gameplay out of it.

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