Nerd Mentality

Polarium

Posted by Jordan Mammo.

Looking at the games out for the Nintendo DS and those getting ready for release, it would appear that the system is becoming the place for pick-up-and-play gaming. Polarium follows Yoshi Touch and Go as another title in the DS's growing library of games that can be played for ten minutes or forty and still leave a gamer satisfied with their experience.

The concept behind Polarium is simple. You're given a panel that's filled with rows of black and white tiles. Drawing a line over a black tile will turn it into a white one, and vice versa. When you turn all of the tiles in a row into the same color, that row disappears.

The heart of the game is the Puzzle mode. Here, you'll find 100 puzzles that you can unlock and solve. Solving the first ten unlocks the next set of ten, and this continues until you've cleared all the puzzles that the game has to offer. Players must draw a single line that will flip over the tiles and eliminate all of the panel's rows at once. There are no falling lines and there's no time limit in this mode, just static puzzles that you can solve at your own pace.

However, it gets tough. Things start out easy enough but, as the game gradually introduces new techniques, some of the puzzles can end up taking a good fifteen minutes or more to figure out. In the event that you get stuck, the game offers two hints and even displays your previous attempt on the top screen. Of course, the hints don't mark the only way you can solve the puzzle, and so there's still plenty of room for experimentation.

The only thing that's disappointing about the Puzzle mode is that it has to end eventually, and once you've solved that last puzzle, you're done. The one bright spot is that there's an edit mode in which you can create your own puzzles and save them. However, since you need to solve the puzzles before you can save them, this doesn't usually end up being very fun for you. If you have a friend who's interested in these types of brain teasers, though, the edit mode can increase the longevity of Polarium considerably.

The other mode available is Challenge. Challenge is what we've come to expect from the puzzle genre: lines start falling and you have to make them disappear as fast as possible. When the stack of lines is higher than allowed, the game ends. This mode is built on the same premise as Puzzle, but now you don't have all the time in the world and don't have to clear everything in a single stroke. Even so, the challenge comes from having to discover the best way possible to clear the set of lines that drop. Clearing many lines with one stroke is much more beneficial than trying to clear one line at a time with smaller strokes

However, therein this is a fundamental part of the problem with Challenge. What could have been a fun combo system eventually becomes almost a non-entity because you don't have the time to solve the puzzles and rack up the points. One mistake is usually all it takes for you to be swamped in lines and for your chance to chain together multiple lines to be all but gone. Devolving into a simple race to clear one or two lines at a time just to stay alive, things can get even more frustrating because of the pause that occurs whenever you select the tiles you want to flip over. You're essentially limited to how quickly you can draw while the lines above keep falling at a faster and faster pace. Of course, practicing and replaying helps to improve your efficiency, but Challenge ultimately ends up not being appealing enough for extended play.

On the graphical side of things, Polarium isn't much of a looker. If you've seen the screenshots, you've seen what the game has to offer in this department. With the whole game revolving around black and white tiles, though, it's not surprising that the color palette is so limited. The music is also notably toned down, accompanied only by a congratulatory sound effect when you clear a panel of tiles.

This game gets an N-Philes score of C+.

Ultimately, whether or not Polarium is worth a purchase depends almost entirely on your taste in puzzle games. If you're a fan of brain teasers, then the game's 100 puzzles are definitely worth the price of admission (even though it is a little steep). If, on the other hand, you tend to enjoy the more traditional puzzle games that involve making falling objects disappear, you might want to skip Polarium and wait for something like Puyo Pop Fever, which comes out on May 3rd.

Posted in: Reviews

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