Luxor: Amun Rising Review

Intro

Wow, fun and challenging? Could it be true?

The Story

In an interesting twist, this puzzle game has you going through various Egyptian looking scenes in which a row of marbles are being pushed towards your base by scarabs. Your goal is to shoot marbles upwards into the lines to create rows of 3 or more to eliminate them from the board before they can be pushed into your goal.

The Good And The Bad

When I first started playing this game I really thought that it was going to be just like the others that I’ve played lately… no originality, and no difficulty but upon playing I found myself getting sucked in very quickly at just how difficult this game is to get the hang of.

I’m sure that it didn’t help that I put it on the hardest difficulty setting right away but I thought that this was going to be best. I found out very quickly that the hardest difficult setting is actually very difficult and so I put it down on the intermediate difficulty setting only to find out that the game became much too easy for me.

Unfortunately this game never figures out how to walk this delicate balance very well and this is where it suffers. It’s either too difficult or too easy, never something in the middle.

The save feature was definitely a welcome addition to this game as before long I was really dying to take a break but it would’ve been better if the save feature were a little more prominent. I didn’t even know that this game had a save feature until I gave up looking for it and decided to just forfeit the progress I made by closing the game. It was only then did I see a screen pop up that said that my progress would be saved for the next time.

The game play in this game is quite original which was certainly a welcome treat to this reviewers eyes. While this basic concept may have been used before, I’m hard pressed to come up with any real examples as to where and when it was used.

The one thing that really confuses me though is that if they are going to go through the trouble of creating separate stages and levels as well as setting the game in Egypt, why not come up with some kind of simple central story to go with it?

Music

There really wasn’t any music to this game. Some simple tunes got played every once in awhile but it was nothing that stood out as extraordinary. It was just there.

The sound effects were certainly kept to a minimum and were unobtrusive at best.

Overall

Once I finally managed to get the hang of this game, I really started to enjoy it. While I would’ve liked it if they could’ve walked the balance between too difficult and too easy a bit more delicately, it’s still a fun game and a good way to pass the time.