One of the first things I noticed about Chains is that there was no tutorial; that’s fine, I could probably figure this out. When the first level, Trident, loads there is a clear message on the screen “Clear 100″. After a moment the level loads and the balls begin to fill in the empty spaces. I sat and watched them fill it, waiting for some kind of direction as to exactly how to clear these multi-coloured balls that had filled in the level and after a short time a box came up and with instructions. This was going to be a lot of fun, no more mind numbing word games, just a brightly coloured and interesting version of connect the dots!

On to the next level! Clear 200 without losing any, and the balls start falling down into this little trapped area with a gate held closed by a counterweight. This was the first time I actually lost a level; sad probably since the first went by so well. My second biggest complaint with the game was that the helpful hints would take enough time to read that by the time I was back to the game the number of balls piled up caused me to fail the level. This happened a couple times before I learned that the game auto pauses when it loses focus. Awesome idea, I really liked this. Now when the hints would come up I would alt tab to some other program and move it out of the way so that I could take my time to read over the hints.

The music throughout the game was very pleasant and I ended up turning off my own music to listen to it. On the fourth level the music really seemed to fit and I didn’t want to leave the level, because it was too much fun.

Gravity was one of the most unique levels I managed to play, aside from
perhaps Coathanger. It was also the first level on which the background
caused my brain to say “ow.” Playing at 800×600 on a 1280×1024 screen the
backgrounds hadn’t really gotten to me before, but the bright pink really
screamed. Many of the levels have very bright or neon colours that make
the hint boxes hard to read and occasionally hurt the eyes after a time.
In the end this was the only thing that kept me from playing longer;
bright colours in a dark room strain the eyes quite a bit.

Many of the levels are not timed per se but you must keep things in balance. Other levels have one, two or even three timers that must be kept track of. At the end of each level you are prompted as to whether you want to continue playing the same level or advance to the next one; either way the level saves as soon as you quit playing it. There are no bonus levels, power ups or rewards that I uncovered, besides the obvious reward of moving from level to level.
By the end of the first day playing the game I had played all the way to the 12th level of 20 and I’m sure if the pizza delivery guy hadn’t shown up I would still be playing instead of doing the review. Over all Chains was a very entertaining game, the levels are each unique, and after the first couple of levels the difficulty scales up very well.

Puzzle games are not really my thing, I get bored easily matching shapes or colours or putting numbers in some sequence; so when I was asked to review Puzzlegeddon I was kind of dubious to try it. After setting up my profile I decided to run through the tutorial, usually I regret doing this but not with Puzzlegeddon; the tutorial was informative, concise and you didn’t have to wait forever while some character told you what to do. A quick look at the puzzle board reveals squares of four colours, and placing five or more of them together and right clicking causes them to clear. On top of the puzzle are four meters of matching colours that fill up as you clear tiles from the board.

A quick run through the tutorial and I was off to try and beat the evil robots in a single player game. I chose a short timed game with two easy robots for opponents and it was a very quick game, my colour matching skills aren’t quite up to par it seems. That first game, although quick was very helpful. Filling up each of the meters to different levels yields new and exciting ways to blast your opponents to oblivion! Of course filling up other ones save you from being blown into little pieces yourself. Finally I won against the two easy robots so I thought I would put in one hard robot to go with the two easy ones; there was nothing left of me put a few pieces of dust blowing somewhere in the wind a few miles away. Looks like it’s going to take some practice before I’m ready for him.

When you are defeated, there is a mini-puzzle that you can defeat to get back into the game, assuming there is time left and the game doesn’t end first. These puzzles were much harder than the main puzzle but still a lot of fun. The only thing I didn’t really like about this is that they were fairly dark. I would expect it to be darker and not the bright colours of the main game but a few times I had to lean closer to the monitor to be able to see what was on some of the tiles.

Puzzlegeddon is an amazingly well done game and is extremely easy to get hooked on. If you can get past the first game or two then you will be playing late into the night (or morning as my case was). The second time I played the game, I figured I would play for a few hours and then go do the rest of the things I had to do for the day. It didn’t work out nearly that way, after playing for nearly 8 hours I finally managed to close the game and get started on the other things that had to be done. I haven’t had a chance to play the multi-player games yet but I can only imagine how much fun it will be to play against people instead of bots. If you don’t see me around, you’ll know right where to fine me, launching missiles at my friends!