Boonka Game

In this time of heightened environmental awareness, it’s surprising that more game companies aren’t looking at saving the earth as a central theme. Boonka, from Raptisoft and Sandlot Games, takes the idea of rebuilding forests and crafts a deep match-three game on top, with some surprising (and sometimes downright odd) results.

Aided by the Voice of the Land, a creature named Bababoonka – looking like a bizarre cross between a water-based alien and a Buddha statue – your job is to rebuild the clear-cut trees and save the land from the invading Skours, a race of black cloud-like beings. Using Bababoonka’s power to turn into smaller spiritual creatures called Boonkas, you’ll cause the trees to grow back, eventually taking the fight to the Skour stronghold.

The story is told through cutscenes before each level. While nothing spectacular, the audio and video is pleasant and definitely fits the themes and tone of the game. Everything is clean, clear and easy to see.

The main game, dubbed Adventure Mode, has you travel across the world map, saving a small group of trees as each of the game’s 60+ levels. Basically, as you chain and remove multiple Boonkas, a Grow meter fills on the side. Boonkas are added across the bottom, one row at a time. If they get too high in the well, the Skours win and you must try again. Once enough Boonkas have been removed, the word “Grow” lights up, and after one final removal, the tree is restored to its earlier majesty.

It’s a simple concept, but Boonka is anything but simple. It’s a wonderful creative break from tradition, albeit to the extreme.

First, let’s look at how the pieces are moved. Typical match-three games force you to swap pairs of icons to make matches (a la Bejeweled). Here, each Boonka is moved individually, and in any direction. Only horizontal matches can be made, though, and form a barrier preventing any Boonka from travelling through it. However, the chain can be as large as every like-icon on the board, because they are not automatically removed.

Special pixies appear on the board, and when two are linked, they take off like a rocket, lifting any chained Boonkas out of the playfield that they impact on the way up. Obviously, strategy becomes an integral part of the gameplay. It’s best to try to have a longer horizontal line of matches to remove as much as possible, but, again, it’s not that simple.

Boonka employs a complex bonus, item and strategy system with some very odd names. For example, if you link five Boonkas, the word Boonka pops up, giving you a bonus. If you can make a chain that spans the entire width of the playfield, you’ve just make a Krosh. Lift it, and you get a Crushka bonus (and if it’s especially large, you get a Super Crushka). Also, links can be formed in step-like shapes, called Linkas. There are special one-time bonuses, too; for exampple, if you make a lift and a cliff of five Boonkas or higher remains, you’ve got a Tower Maker, and are rewarded with an Icie, who, if you double-click him, freezes all surrounding Boonkas to help them lift off in one giant chunk.

While deep and complex, Boonka’s reward system is very difficult to keep straight in your head. Very often, you’ll stumble upon a bonus you may not have been told about. For example, I somehow managed to link 50% of the Boonkas on the playfield. The game paused, announced I had done the feat and encouraged me to go for 75%. I never knew this was a goal, so of course it became a new part of my strategy. While the game offers up much of this information gradually during mini tutorial lessons before each level, it borders on “a little too much to remember.”

After each level, you’re offered an extra challenge level. These are great brain scratchers, like lift two pixies but never make a link with a Boonka, or link every Boonka on a level before lifting. They are a devilishly good challenge, only marred by the fact that you can’t replay them once completed.

There are boss levels too: the Skour Towers. Here, the Skours themselves hinder lifts by reducing your score earned by the lift. However, the Boonkas are, to put it politely, miffed. They look cute to begin with, but here they’re downright mad, with angry animations that add a humorous charm to these extra-challenging levels.

Rounding out the package are two other modes. Blitz Mode challenges you to work as quickly as possible to clear the playfield of Boonkas. My favorite, though, is Beanstalk Mode, a relaxing infinite-play mode where the only goal is to keep growing for as long as possible. Neither mode feels tacked-on, and both are great practice for the Adventure Mode.

A word of advice: play this game with a proper mouse. I tried using my laptop’s trackpad, and moving Boonkas felt imprecise at best. It plays completely differently when you’re in control. (There’s no option to adjust movement sensitivity.)

While bordering on excessively-complicated, Boonka offers a fresh look at a packed genre. Don’t let the cutesy graphics fool you. This is a robust match-three that stacks up against any of them, and will hopefully Super Crushka its way into your casual game library.

Review by David Stone
Gamezebo, Inc.

Farm Frenzy: Pizza Party

Farm Frenzy – Pizza Party is pretty much the same as Farm Frenzy 2. There are some noticeable improvements – trucks and planes can be upgraded, and the map is much more interesting. But although there are sone new products and buildings, it’s the same layout and the same basic gameplay.If you liked the first two, you’ll probably like this one. Just don’t expect much to have changed down on the farm.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Farm Frenzy is a time management game where you care for livestock (chickens, goats, cows, and pigs) to get their output, like milk or eggs. You send the output to small farm buildings to create “products” like egg powder or cream. You also order city items like yeast to combine with farm products for complex items like dough. You send items to the city to sell. Some buildings can be upgraded to produce faster or in a higher quantity. While you are doing all this, your farm is occasionally attacked by bears, which you have to trap in cages with multiple mouse clicks. You can also buy dogs and cats to help you.

There’s never been much story to the Farm Frenzy series. You just get different goals for each level, and some strategy choices in how to reach those goals. But the graphics are cute, the tasks are challenging, and gameplay is smooth. We also like the use of a tracking timer, which means you have to play very quickly to get a gold medal, but if you don’t make the target time you still keep playing. This is a much better learning environment than games that just cut you off if you don’t meet the goal.

On the other hand, you’re going to need to do all that learning on your own. Although there’s a simple gameplay tutorial, there’s nothing built-in to learn the strategy aspects of the game. Moreover, one of the weaknesses of the early titles is magnified in this one—not enough visual cues for planning strategy on the fly. Many items look similar, it’s hard to remember what all the different buildings do, and there’s no good way to quickly check different recipes. Yes, if you put your cursor in just the right spot on a building that you own you’ll see its ingredients. But you can’t check the recipe for a building you don’t own yet, or see what happens if you decide to upgrade. And the various pitchers and beakers and bottles all look fairly similar.

Eventually you get pretty good at scanning the scene and quickly realizing you’ll need chickens, goats, and to buy pickles from the city, but the strategy part of the game would really benefit from strong color coding or an accessible recipe book.

The newest part of this title is the pizza concept. Instead of making flat bread, you make pizzas, combining ingredients from the farm like cheese and dough with purchased ingredients flown in from the city. There are different pizza recipes for different countries, but the farm itself is always the same—it’s just the pizza flavor that changes. All in all there are now 28 different products to produce instead of 16, counting the 6 different kinds of pizza. And Farm Frenzy – Pizza Party has 90 levels, offering lots of variety and excellent length for this genre.

We liked two new features very much. First, the new plane is much faster, so you don’t have to plan trips so far in advance. You can even buy some farm products in the city if you have a lot of money but not a lot of time. This is a big improvement. Second, the new map is fun, because at several points multiple levels will open, leaving you to choose between a harder goal for an existing skill or learning something altogether new. They dropped the “gag” concept, but it’s not really needed. The game itself is challenging enough.

So that brings us to the question of whether to buy: how much change does a sequel have to offer? Although the basic gameplay is the same, players do have to learn new recipes, new buildings, and some new strategies as the game progresses.

With the improvements Farm Frenzy – Pizza Party is clearly the best of an already good series, so new players should definitely start with this title. If you’ve played one of the Farm Frenzy series before, we think you’ll enjoy this game, too, but expect a strong sense of deja vu for the first 5 or 6 levels.

Review by Robin Jackson
Gamezebo, Inc.

Emerald City Confidential

Work with the world’s most cunning detective in the shadowy underbelly of the Emerald City of Oz! As Petra, you’ll be lured deep into mysteries involving new foes and familiar faces; Scarecrow, Lion, Dorothy and Toto included. This is Oz as you’ve never seen it before! Solve your detective’s quest and unravel a conspiracy of magic and intrigue! Follow a case through five chapters full of puzzles, witnesses, suspects, and allies.
The Emerald City Confidential game features:
* Over 50 beautiful and detailed environments to explore
* First PlayFirst game with full voiceover – 36 characters and over 6,000 lines of spoken dialog
* A new story and twist on the timeless world and classic characters of Oz

Little Shop – Memories

Not everything needs to change to stay satisfying. Like a mug of hot chocolate on a winter day, some pleasures are classics, time after time. GameHouse, the developer behind the Little Shop hidden object games, understands this very well. Little Shop – Memories, the fifth title in the series, simply gives us more of what we liked before: a quality hidden object game.

This time out, you’re moving to a new store. First, though, you have to clean out the attic, which triggers a series of memories, each of which is a different hidden object scene. As you complete each scene, you add a keepsake, like an old report card or ticket stub, to a scrapbook. The keepsakes tell an amusing story and have a lot of detail for those who are interested, but you can skip the story altogether if you just want to get to the gameplay.

Initially you see 15 attic locations to search, from an old trunk to a broken television. As you start to examine a location, you get access to 4 hidden object scenes, each representing a memory. These are things like your first lemonade stand, your college dorm room, your first office job. In each memory scene you’ll search for 15 items.

Over the course of the game you’ll revisit each of 12 unique memory scenes 5 times, and you’ll get more story detail as you progress. In addition to searching for Find List objects, each scene has a bonus Polaroid snapshot that goes into the back of your scrapbook and can be examined later.

You can also find several special items. Question marks add to your hint counter. Cameras and thermometers help locate items from the FIND list.

The “?” hints stay with you for the duration of the game. However, the camera and thermometer power-ups are used as soon as you click on them, so you may want to pass them by until you really need them.

As you revisit memory scenes, the Find Lists and the position of some objects change, so the gameplay remains challenging.

However, the hint system is still odd. While most HOGs have a hint system that shows the exact location of an item, Little Shop has always tried to avoid that. The primary hints show what the object looks like, but not where it is. The thermometer is a hot/cold find indicator. New to this title, the camera gives a quick flash that does show the location of the items at the top of the find list, but it only lasts a second—and the background is whited out at the same time, so it’s still hard to locate some items precisely.

We’re not sure why Gamehouse is so stubborn about not providing a conventional hint system. Still, you can replay any level as often as you like to try and get a higher score, and most players will be able to earn all trophies eventually.

After every 4 scenes, there is a mini-game, a total of 16 in all. Most are hidden object variations—find 5 pairs of objects based on clues, or find the missing parts to a picture. They’re a nice change from the regular search, although some players may need to replay them 2 or 3 times to advance.

And then there’s Blitz mode. Once you’ve completed the game in regular mode, you can try Blitz, where you get the complete item list of about 75 objects for each scene, and you try to find them all as quickly as possible. The game retains previous scores, and you can submit to the online scoreboard also.

We have to applaud the fantastic amount of detail in each scene. From the Pet Rock in the high school locker to the wooden stilts and banana seat bike at the childhood lemonade stand, it’s clear that each scene was painstakingly constructed to tell a complete story. The scenes are a pleasure to search, as even items that aren’t on the Find List are interesting.

So while there’s nothing new in Little Shop – Memories, all the old stuff is still as much fun as ever. If you have a taste for classic hidden object games, the series continues to deliver good value.

Review by Robin Jackson
Gamezebo, Inc.

Strike Ball 3

The brick-busting genre is one of gaming’s oldest chestnuts, and this time Strike Ball 3 is up. The third game in the series from Russian developer Owl Games, Strike Ball 3 builds upon its predecessors very well.

The original Strike Ball was a rudimentary 3D ball-breaker, but provided decent fun. The sequel, Strike Ball 2 was an enormous step up from the original that featured a slew of power-ups and great level design.

It must be said that compared to the step up from the original to the sequel, Strike Ball 3 is less revolutionary compared to Strike Ball 2. However, the changes are very important, and fundamentally alter the gameplay.

When booted up for the first time, check out all the graphics options. If you have a higher-end computer, you’ll be able to tweak all sorts of special effects like color depth and reflections. While these options are purely aesthetic, they really add a high level of polish and sparkle to the game. It’s a shame that a number of casual gamers’ rigs probably won’t be able to handle the upper-end graphics to see the game as it could be, but fear not: even on the lowest settings, Strike Ball 3 is still quite pretty.

But we’re not here to look at all the lovely scenery, right? It’s time to unleash some mammoth destruction!

The biggest addition to Strike Ball 3 is the PhysX engine, powered by nVidia. Basically, this means that if you knock a box over, the game will calculate exactly how it will tumble, roll or ricochet off other objects. Right off the bat, the advantages to adding this are obvious: Imagine a giant tower built of destructible bricks. You break its foundations. As the bricks fall, they sprawl all over the level, dynamically changing the playfield. Now add four balls each ricocheting off each other, and you can begin to imagine some of the chaotic joy in Strike Ball 3.

The level designs take great advantage of this physics engine, but that’s not the only ace up Strike Ball 3’s sleeve. Items play a huge role in the game. There are helpful items, like bombs that explode all the scenery, or hindering items like ball speed-ups or paddle-shrinkers. But best of all, there are levels designed specifically around items. For instance, metal bricks cannot be destroyed by the standard ball. However, there is one machine that doles out homing missile power-ups. Start collecting those, and the metal blocks can be decimated, allowing your ball to go in and take care of business. Power-ups are also cumulative, so if you get a 2x power-up, then a 3x and fireball, suddenly there are six flaming spheres of annihilation at your control.

In a new feature for the series, these items are upgrable. Levels are littered with collectible stars. Between each of the 100 levels, you can buy upgrades for items with these starts, both for positive and negative items. An upgrade for a positive item could be more ammunition for a machine gun upgrade, or extra time for a protective energy barrier. An upgrade for a negative item lessens the item’s impact, like reducing the amount of time your ball’s trajectory goes nuts with the Crazy Ball item. After a few levels, the amount of control over your destruction goes up.

Speaking of control, Strike Ball 3 adds a new twist to your paddle in the form of a magnetic control. If you find that the ball is just not going where you want it to, you can press your left mouse button, and the paddle actively draws the ball towards it. It’s a great feature, and as the levels get more complex, it’s very helpful.

If there’s one aspect in which Strike Ball 3 falls, it’s the music. The level of excitement the music brings falls somewhere between an elevator and my dentist’s waiting room. There aren’t enough tracks for the length of this game, and the tracks that are there are a little too easy-going compared to the gameplay. Also, with such complicated physics and graphics engines at work, there is occasional slowdown during the game.

Overall, though, Strike Ball 3 is a great, dynamic ball-breaker that is definitely more than your average time-waster. It’s amazing that, after all these years, there are still new ways to move the genre ahead. The improvements from one Strike Ball game to the next have been fantastic. Sign me up for Strike Ball 4 on its release day!
Review by David Stone
Gamezebo, Inc.