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IGN Review of Luxor: Pharaoh's Challenge
The meteoric rise of the casual games market has opened the floodgates for potential gaming newcomers -- soccer moms and grandparents scared off by controllers with eleventy billion buttons can now join the rest of the gaming community. Nintendo has happily embraced the crowd, tweaking their marketing and to a degree even their hardware design to welcome Flash game addicts with open arms. With well over a hundred million PlayStation 2s, though, Sony has been eager to court casuals -- particularly as they move to position the PS2 as a casual machine going into its eighth year of existence.
The combination of receptive hardware and a booming sector of the games industry have culminated in stuff like Luxor: Pharaoh's Challenge, one of many Mumbo Jumbo games to get a console equivalent. Setting aside the weirdness of paying $20 for something that can be effectively enjoyed for free on a PC, Luxor's gameplay is indeed accessible to newcomers and satisfies the PS2's need to fill the casual niche. It does, however, warrant the question of whether or not it's actually a full, proper experience.
I'm not talking about whether it's an actual game; that much is solved about five minutes in when using the d-pad to move a little cursor around while tapping the X Button to fire randomly colored balls up into a snaking line of like-colored balls in an effort to whittle the snake down to nothing before it creeps into the home base, a concept so deceptively simple that it makes people write paragraph-sized run-on sentences like this one.
Here's the bottom line: does Luxor actually deliver $20 worth of game? For comparison's sake, I hit up Mumbo Jumbo's web site and grabbed a demo of Luxor 3 (Pharaoh's Challenge is just a re-branded Luxor 2). Not only was it free, but it actually introduced concepts that made it feel like a complete experience; collecting the falling gems that serve as the game's currency gave you the ability to buy better power-ups, and additional targets on the screen added more busy work for the player.
Pharaoh's Challenge has a limited sense of progression, mind you. As you rack up points in the game's main "story" mode (there's a tale of a Songstress who is told of a feather that weighs a person's heart, and pure hearts that are equal to the feather are allowed into a blissful afterlife) you'll slowly level up the strength of the random power-ups that spill out of chains of four or more destroyed balls, but this is barely explained in the manual and there's no real indicator of how close you are to leveling each up. The result is a game that feels identical the whole way through in what approaches triple-digit numbers of snaking puzzles. Little things like bonus levels where you control the snake, or have to destroy all the balls in a snake with arrows do little to break things up.
It's also a $20 experience that's easily bested by a free demo that can be played on even the most modest of systems. Granted, we're talking about a demo of the sequel to the game, but given the relative ease with which a game like this can be ported over, it makes Pharaoh's Challenge feel even more like a cheap cash-in. As it stands, you can download the demo of Luxor 2 for free and get everything you'd find in the full game minus a bunch of needless repetition and the challenge that comes from spending a half-dozen hours to get to the puzzles that'll actually make you sweat a little. To me, that illustrates just how much of a rip-off the full game actually is.
Again, if it were a complex game, it would make a little more sense, but the 2D visuals and handful of backdrops that are reused frequently just make it all seem like a quick and dirty port. The backgrounds are pretty enough, certainly, carrying the Egyptian motif to the nth degree and rife with references to gods like Set and Osiris (in both the story and the names of the levels), and it's all complemented by a lilting, languid soundtrack that is really quite decent even after hours of hearing it, but it certainly isn't pushing the PS2 hardware.
Not even the promise of unlocking badges for doing things like finishing 10 levels without losing a life or getting a chain of five or more isn't really incentive enough to keep playing. The "blessings" that are doled out as you progress through the story stages that let you do everything from slow the speed of the snakes to boost the speed of your shots are equally limp. Yes, it's a value-priced game, but none of it feels worthy of that Andrew Jackson you'll have to part with.
©2008-01-08, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The combination of receptive hardware and a booming sector of the games industry have culminated in stuff like Luxor: Pharaoh's Challenge, one of many Mumbo Jumbo games to get a console equivalent. Setting aside the weirdness of paying $20 for something that can be effectively enjoyed for free on a PC, Luxor's gameplay is indeed accessible to newcomers and satisfies the PS2's need to fill the casual niche. It does, however, warrant the question of whether or not it's actually a full, proper experience.
I'm not talking about whether it's an actual game; that much is solved about five minutes in when using the d-pad to move a little cursor around while tapping the X Button to fire randomly colored balls up into a snaking line of like-colored balls in an effort to whittle the snake down to nothing before it creeps into the home base, a concept so deceptively simple that it makes people write paragraph-sized run-on sentences like this one.
Here's the bottom line: does Luxor actually deliver $20 worth of game? For comparison's sake, I hit up Mumbo Jumbo's web site and grabbed a demo of Luxor 3 (Pharaoh's Challenge is just a re-branded Luxor 2). Not only was it free, but it actually introduced concepts that made it feel like a complete experience; collecting the falling gems that serve as the game's currency gave you the ability to buy better power-ups, and additional targets on the screen added more busy work for the player.
Pharaoh's Challenge has a limited sense of progression, mind you. As you rack up points in the game's main "story" mode (there's a tale of a Songstress who is told of a feather that weighs a person's heart, and pure hearts that are equal to the feather are allowed into a blissful afterlife) you'll slowly level up the strength of the random power-ups that spill out of chains of four or more destroyed balls, but this is barely explained in the manual and there's no real indicator of how close you are to leveling each up. The result is a game that feels identical the whole way through in what approaches triple-digit numbers of snaking puzzles. Little things like bonus levels where you control the snake, or have to destroy all the balls in a snake with arrows do little to break things up.
It's also a $20 experience that's easily bested by a free demo that can be played on even the most modest of systems. Granted, we're talking about a demo of the sequel to the game, but given the relative ease with which a game like this can be ported over, it makes Pharaoh's Challenge feel even more like a cheap cash-in. As it stands, you can download the demo of Luxor 2 for free and get everything you'd find in the full game minus a bunch of needless repetition and the challenge that comes from spending a half-dozen hours to get to the puzzles that'll actually make you sweat a little. To me, that illustrates just how much of a rip-off the full game actually is.
Again, if it were a complex game, it would make a little more sense, but the 2D visuals and handful of backdrops that are reused frequently just make it all seem like a quick and dirty port. The backgrounds are pretty enough, certainly, carrying the Egyptian motif to the nth degree and rife with references to gods like Set and Osiris (in both the story and the names of the levels), and it's all complemented by a lilting, languid soundtrack that is really quite decent even after hours of hearing it, but it certainly isn't pushing the PS2 hardware.
Not even the promise of unlocking badges for doing things like finishing 10 levels without losing a life or getting a chain of five or more isn't really incentive enough to keep playing. The "blessings" that are doled out as you progress through the story stages that let you do everything from slow the speed of the snakes to boost the speed of your shots are equally limp. Yes, it's a value-priced game, but none of it feels worthy of that Andrew Jackson you'll have to part with.
©2008-01-08, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved