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this is a simple, short time limit, “match 3″ by switching 2 jewels to drop 3-6 item pieces to the bottom.

it has the usual ice, double ice, chains, double chains & blocks at the bottom (so you have to move item piece to a diff column *hardest for me*). it also occasionally has hourglass for more time, money bags for extra points & very rare heart for an extra life. the item pieces, hourglass, money bags are obviously “dead” pieces that are in your way to match 3 jewels/stones, the more there are …

the other unique style to this game is the hammer power-up. if you match 4+ you build up power to create a hammer that can destroy 1 jewel/stone. do even more match 4+ w/o using the hammer & it becomes more powerful to destroy all the stones of the color you choose. build up more 4+ matches & you have a bomb that destroys 5-6 jewels in any area you choose. the next/last power-up destroys in a line burst in 4-5 directions. if a jewel is chained or iced, you only take off, for example, one chain, not both. you can use the power-up as much as you want if you can match 4+ that many times in the time limit. you can only use the power-up in that level, each level you start from scratch.

you only get 5 lives to start & besides the rare heart, you need 100,000 points for another life. I get on avg. only about 5K points each level. if you run out of lives, you start from the beginning of that landmark. such as USA (last) would have about 12 levels.

the way this is done, it starts out incredibly easy & introduces new challenges slowly. also, it has a hint system to tell you where a match is if you don’t make one for over 5 seconds (it automatically shuffles/restarts when there are no matches). as another reviewer said, if you make a match & falling stones/jewels keep making matches, you have to wait & watch as the stopwatch keep ticking (which can go on for 15+seconds). that was the only thing I didn’t like. also, this game, especially towards the end, really focuses on the hammer power-up as many layouts can’t be done w/o using the powerup more & more often during a level. Such as lone blocks away from the main area which makes it impossible to match since there aren’t 3 blocks together.

besides intertwining a classic book by seeing static drawn faces w/speech bubbles & reading pages in between the 80 levels (not much of the book, more like cliff notes & you can skip all dialog & reading), you get a screen saver of 7 static landmarks that are in a sideshow: England, France, Egypt, India, China, Japan, USA. the only thing they do (besides rain & clouds move) is have the sun/moon rise/fall so you see the night & day change with lights (the night look I think is the only good one.)

this game gets more challenging by the 60th level, but it still gives you a little easier levels here & there. I didn’t lose all my lives until day 78. yeah, so close & that’s as far as I’ve gotten so far, I don’t play often. this isn’t as hard as “Atlantis quest”, but it is maybe slightly harder then “big kahuna reef”, though not by much if at all. I liked this more then “big kahuna reef”, the hammer in the earlier levels made it incredibly easy & does give a level of satisfaction to see the problem disappear when used right.

edit: I finished all 81 levels. it has 2 more journeys, the exact same boards & retells the story again w/same time limit, except it adds more difficulties. so far on journey 2 to level 31 (start of india), it already adds “debris” which looks like a boulder/brain/fog & you can get rid of it by dropping it down as well.
Rating: 4 / 5

The other reviewers are right – it’s a gorgeous game with a fun concept, but it’s slow – the in-between levels stuff is what makes the game interesting, but some elements (like score tallying and splash screens for each level) aren’t really necessary. During the game, play is entirely stopped at times while the tiles move around after you’ve made a match – you have to wait until everything settles before you can make your next move.

You can turn off the ‘hints’ feature, but it doesn’t stay turned off. I find this really distracting when I’m looking over the board to decide what I need to move to get a piece unstuck, but this seems to be an unfortunate standard with match-3 games.

My major complaint is the lack of an untimed mode. I’m not playing to get the highest score or best time – I’m playing to relax. I get enough deadlines and stress in real life, and I found myself getting very tense as the clock wound down. That pretty much took all the fun out of the game, and if there is a cheat code to get around it, I couldn’t find it on a google search.

Going back to Big Kahuna – it’s getting a bit old, but at least it doesn’t stress me out.
Rating: 2 / 5