Polarium for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

This is a puzzle game where the screen is covered in small boxes, either black or white. You change their color by tapping on them with the stylus. When you get an entire row of blocks the same color, it disappears. Instead of just tapping single blocks, though, you usually try to draw long connected lines on the screen, changing lots of boxes at once. This is much faster than tapping on each individual box, and it's where the game's strategy comes from.

The trouble with the game is that the pacing is all wrong in the main ("arcade") game mode. The actual game mechanics are fun -- it's enjoyable to find the perfect patterns to make lots of rows disappear at once. However, the pieces that fall into the display as you progress aren't random -- they are chosen from a small set of block shapes, each with a "trick" to how they can be erased efficiently. The trouble is, because these are so repetitive, the game is pretty easy. To counter this, the game gets really, really FAST really quickly. So Polaris ends up being a memorization game -- recognize the pattern, quickly draw it, and get ready for the next pattern to fall down. The game's mechanics seem to focus on creative thinking, but it just doesn't deliver on that -- instead, it's a race to draw the same old patterns over and over.

The exception to this is the puzzle mode, where you have a small number of lines on the screen which you must completely erase with only a single contiguous line. These puzzles are often ingenious, and here you really see the potential of the game's basic mechanics. Sadly, there are only 100 of these puzzles -- if there were more, I could recommend this game. When you run out, you can create new puzzles and share them between friends, but really, that's what game designers are for. You have better things to do.

In all, Polaris is disappointing, because the game's mechanics are really fun. Too bad they totally missed the point in the arcade mode.