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8.8 ultra recommended
You can search through your Past Worlds atlas as often as you like, but you'll never find mention of the fabled continent of Atlantis. To find the island paradise, now sunk beneath the waves, you need to conquer the match-3 games of Playrix Entertainment. So grab an oar and get ready for a spin around the Mediterranean.
Call of Atlantis is the third game in Playrix's popular Atlantis match-3 series. Our story starts with Poseidon, god of the sea and god of the earthquake, getting a bit ticked off that the Atlanteans - people living on a continent he created especially for them - have lost their appreciation for his might. (Imagine your cute little floppy-eared dog grew complacent and stopped running up to you when you came home or called it's name - that's the way Poseidon felt... except times ten.) Little do the Atlanteans know that Poseidon built a secret altar on the floor of the Sapphire Ocean - what we know today as the Mediterranean Sea - and set within it seven powerful crystals. These crystals keep Atlantis safe. Calling on his fish friends, Aquaman, I mean Poseidon, has the crystals pulled from the altar and arranges for them to be caught, one each, in the fishing nets of the seven surrounding kingdoms.
And thus Atlantis sinks beneath the waves! Several years later, you arrive on the scene. Can you restore the crystals to the altar and save Atlantis? I can answer that question having already played the game, and the answer is yes - if you're a match-3 game champion.
Gameplay is typical for the match-3 genre. You're presented with a board full of game pieces, each piece one of four or five varieties. You must swap adjacent pieces to form groups (either rows or columns) of three or more pieces of the same kind. Pieces can only be swapped if they create a match, otherwise they quickly shift back to their original position. Any matches you create are removed from the board, and additional pieces fall in from the top to fill the gap they leave behind. Often, additional groups of three or more will be created as gravity does its work, either by the skill of your carefully planned moves, or more often by sheer dumb luck... and those will be removed as well. Thus you can create chain reactions. As you'd expect that gives you bonus points and leads to a higher score.
What's the point? Well, as you travel through the seven lands surrounding the Sapphire Sea (Rome, Greece, Troy, Phoenicia, Babylon, Egypt, and Carthage) your goal is to steal back the lost crystals. To do this, you must appease a local god by acquiring broken items native to the region. In each match-3 puzzle, one broken item's fragments are mixed in with the game pieces on the board. By making matches and removing pieces beneath the fragment, you can drop it to the bottom of the board where it falls free into your greedy hands. Get every piece and you've won the level!
Is it really that easy? No, of course not. If it was, Atlantis would have risen long ago. Unfortunately, obstacles are placed on your game boards. Locks and double locks on pieces make them unswappable. Instead, you have to work with the pieces around them to make a match and break the lock. Frozen (and doubly frozen) pieces likewise cannot be swapped, but even worse they don't drop into spaces below them, potentially stopping your game in its tracks as you struggle to work with just a few movable pieces next to a gaping pit of empty air. And the worst, most evil obstacle of them all: thick mason blocks that keep your precious broken fragments from dropping any further. Fragments just sit on the block, inches from your hands. I hate you, you stupid, stupid blocks! You haven't seen the last of me. I swear an oath of violence on you and all you hold dear.
To aid you on your quest, you have the magical Amulet of Poseidon. It acts like a battery. Make matches of four or more pieces, either intentionally or by luck, and the amulet will charge. Once fully charged, you can click on it to release multiple streams of energy. These will break random pieces on the board, snap apart locks, and melt ice. They don't break blocks, however. Grrrrr. You also have four powerups at your disposal. These are present in some boards and are collected just like item fragments - get them to the bottom of the board and they pop out. Bomb powerups destroy all pieces in a tiny radius. Lightning bolts destroy all of one type of piece on the board. Hourglasses give you additional time to finish a level. (Yes, there is a time limit and believe me, you will hit it more than once as you advance through the game!) Finally, the swap powerup allows you to switch around any two game pieces. Used wisely, this can get you out of many tricky situations. There are also hearts on some game boards, which give you an extra life. Powerups remain in your inventory and can be used in later levels if you wish to save them.
Here's a big Call of Atlantis hint: Save those powerups! Many levels can be won by repeatedly making longer matches to charge the Amulet of Poseidon and then using it to randomly destroy pieces and slowly get stuck item fragments closer and closer to the bottom. The game gets quite challenging as you travel through the later civilizations, and you'll wish you had the powerups from earlier in the game.
Each of the seven lands has twelve items to assemble. Eight are won by completing match-3 puzzles, but the other four can only be obtained in seven hidden object minigames. You're shown the four items and then have to find their pieces in a scene. These minigames aren't going to spin around the pants of a hardcore hidden object game fan, but they do provide a nice break from the match-3 gameplay. Kudos to Playrix Entertainment for allowing random clicking with no penalties - not even a downpitched honking sound effect. Once you assemble the twelve items, you can only continue by placing them in the correct locations in a scene. For example, pruning shears might be used to trim a leafy bush. Or birdseed might be used to feed an unhappy bird. These puzzles are well done and much more interesting than the "click on the Christmas tree ornament" style hidden object puzzles that precede and follow them.
Call of Atlantis is a beautiful game and it's not hard to imagine that it was a labor of love for somebody. Little details, like grapes swinging in the air from an explosion or mouseover, fish that dart away when you click on them, animated backgrounds in every single scene, excellently narrated introductions to new lands, and more nifty particle effects than some AAA budget games can claim... all make up an impressive presentation. Unfortunately, it's unimpressively displayed at 800x600 resolution, so if you're playing on an LCD screen the hidden object scenes will look somewhat fuzzy. But those scenes are just appetizers compared to the match-3 main course, which is as addictive as the best of match-3 games and looks fine at what is, let's be honest, a low resolution these days. As for sound, I can't say that I fell in love with Strategic Music's background themes, but in these kinds of games I typically turn off the music so I can listen to my old The Cars albums at full blast.
I didn't find much to complain about, and since I'm a game reviewer I looked hard. I thought the game loaded a bit slowly just when it's first started up. That's about it.
Did I mention you get Windows screensavers when you complete areas? Because you sure do!
Looks like an interesting game, i think i will download this and give it a try!.