Here's a link to The Clockwork Man: The Clockwork Man
7.1 excellent
No doubt you've been to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City and gazed in wonder at the Stone of Tizoc. (I haven't.) It's time to grab your enemies by the hair and dust off your Nahuatl textbook because Alawar Games has released their second Montezuma game. The first game featured Montezuma 1, the fifth Aztec Emperor. (You know, the guy who built aquaducts in Mesoamerica.) Well, all his treasure has been collected so it's time for a new game and a jump through history to Montezuma 2, the ninth Aztec Emperor... Do you want the good news or the bad news first? The bad news is that Montezuma 2 saw the beginning of the Spanish invasion! The good news is that he left around loads of treasure for you to collect!
The Treasures Of Montezuma 2 is a match-3 game. You've been charged with collecting as many of Montezuma's magical crystals as you can. (Sadly most of his gold and silver is long gone - did you know that Cortés melted down the gold and silver Aztec calendars that Montezuma 2 gave him as a welcoming gift? Just think how valuable they'd be today had the conquistador saved them! What a dufus!)
Gameplay involves swapping neighboring tokens in an 8x8 grid and trying to align three similarly colored tokens in a row, thereby causing them to crumble into pieces. Some tokens contain crystals at their center. When these special tokens crumble, the gems become yours. Collect all of them for that level, and you've won! Depending on the quality of your match-making skills and the speed with which you blast through a level, you receive a number of gold coins as a score. If you think you can do better after finishing a level, you always have the option of replaying it.
Why bother? Because gold coins are used to purchase powerups and special tokens that can help you collect Montezuma's magic crystals. Like the Cradle of Insert City Name Here series of match-3 games, you rebuild a city (presumably Tenochtitlan) by spending coins. Each building represents a special token or powerup. These can even be upgraded. Naturally it's worth revisiting earlier levels once you have more powerup goodness at your disposal if you've failed to get an impressive score the first time through.
In the regular Adventure mode, levels are timed. There are two times to beat: come in under the first time and you win a green mask and many coins; finish between the two countdown times and you receive a yellow mask and not quite as many coins; take any longer than the second time limit and you get a worthless blue-mask-shaped as a participation award and a just a few coins. (An Untimed play mode is unlocked after you finish the first group of levels.) There are also three difficulty levels to challenge yourself with. I must say that the most difficult of them is nigh impossible!
The only really original gameplay mechanic from the preceding Treasures Of Montezuma game is present in this sequel, too: special totem powerups for each color of token on the game board. Once you've purchased these powerups in the town, making back-to-back matches with the same color token kicks off something special. For example, two red matches in a row obliterates a few random pieces with fireballs. Two orange matches in a row adds some time to your countdown clock. And so on.
Also present are frozen tokens that can't be swapped until their ice has been broken, steel tokens that are useless and can only be destroyed by random acts of powerups, and various match-3 powerup staples like bombs, lightning strikes, and so on. A power meter at the bottom of the game board advances with your matches and recedes as time passes - if you can accelerate it all the way to the right you'll enter a brief "Score Frenzy" mode where you receive twice as many points for matches.
Between each group of levels is a "hidden object game" minigame. Unfortunately, these are ridiculously tedious. They involve assembling broken objects by finding and clicking on their various pieces hidden somewhere in the scene. Many of these pieces blend into the background so well, and aren't recognizable objects themselves but rather oddly-shaped pieces of some larger item, that finding them is a hopeless task. I found the first quarter of them with my eyes, the next quarter by random clicking, and finally I got the rest of them by repeatedly clicking on the hint button and waiting for it to recharge. Not much fun.
Overall, The Treasures Of Montezuma 2 is a decent match-3 game, but nothing very exciting. The graphics are a bit bland until you start to activate bomb powerups and see lots of chain-reaction matches. When the game is really whizzing along with explosions and particle effects and game tokens shaking with tremors, it's quite a sight to behold! Still, I can't say I enjoyed this one nearly as much as Big Kahuna Reef 2 or even the Cradle of Insert City Name Here games. My biggest complaint is that swapping pieces in this game is sluggish or just slightly slower than in other match-3 games I've played... time after time I got upset and blamed the game when I heard the Jew's harp sound effect signalling that I missed out on a precious green mask!
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