Game Review: Treasures of Montezuma 2

If you are also lucky enough to have a Samsung phone, you would probably have access to Samsung Apps - this is Samsung's own app marketplace, where you can download apps, which according to their website "is a marketplace designed to provide a variety of mobile applications especially developed and carefully selected for Samsung Mobile Phones."

Anyway, yesterday I browsed through it a bit, and wanted to install several games from there - some big names like Assassins Creed and Need for Speed - these were unfortunately not optimized for the Galaxy S2 yet, so I couldn't get them. But, I did see a few other titles that looked interesting, and downloaded some.

One of those titles were Treasures of Montezuma 2. Through the Samsung Apps thing it was a free download, but I see you can get it through the normal Android App Market as well, but costs a few dollars.

I only played it a bit today, and at first I thought it to be just another Bejeweled clone, but after a few levels, I was kinda hooked...

Here are a few screen shots:

The loading screen:

After the game has loaded, it firstly (and I really like this feature) asks if you want to play without sounds or not. Then it gets to the main menu screen:

As you can see, there are 3 different modes of play available. At the moment, I have only unlocked Survival mode, but haven't tried it out yet - will talk about that as soon as I've played it...

The main game mode is Adventure, which presents you with a bunch of levels:

The ones you have completed get a totem - Green totems mean you've finished that level within a certain time, and you get the full bonus for it, yellow totems are kinda in between, and blue totems pretty much means you took too long, and will get the minimum reward for that level (think of the stars you get in games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope).

The levels look like this:

See, it looks like any other Bejeweled clone, but this little gem of a game have a few interesting twists to the regular recipe. Firstly, some of the totems will have crystals inside them, only when you match these up, do you get closer to finishing the level - you need a certain amount of crystals to finish each stage.

Finishing a stage gives you gold coins, that you can use to buy power up type features. An example of this would be the Red Totem (see it in the bottom left corner) - there are quite a few of them in the game, I've only unlocked Red and Orange - to activate a totem, simply match that totem's colour two times in a row, which will activate it's "power" - the Red Totem shoots two fireballs at random parts on the game board, destroying a few totems in the process. The Orange one turns back the clock 10 seconds. Quite a cool little concept!

Here is the screen where you buy these powers:

Then, some other things that happen to spice up game play is stuff like frozen totems (you cannot move these, but you can still match them up with the same colour totems nearby). There's also the usual stuff like exploding totems (another ability you have to buy at the above screen), totems that destroy other totems of the same colour, etc.

Here is a video of the game in action:

All in all, this is a really fun to play game, and brings some nice twists to the "match 3 or more" genre. It's a great time waster, and I would highly recommend it!

EDIT: I've had the game close on me now twice in a very short time. Hopefully it's a temporary glitch that the developers sort out soon. Will keep you posted

On the Android Market, get it here, or if you have a Samsung phone, search for it in the Samsung Apps application.

Till next time!