Where should I start, how about with the word “addiction”. This game is addicting. It will suck you in to its marble spinning ways and you will lose your soul to it. Once you start playing you're lost. And before you know it 3 hours have gone by, your mouth is dry, you’re fingers are cramping on the controls and your seeing double, or triple, or maybe quadruple. And when you finally convince yourself to put the PSP down and go to bed, you will dream of rows upon rows of colored marbles rushing towards you and there is no place to run to and no place to hide.AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Ok, now that my insane ranting is done with, well maybe not completely, I can tell you about the game.
Luxor: The Wrath of Set is all about colored marbles, zillions of them, all being pushed down a flume by a scarab. When the marbles get to the little stone munchy face at the bottom of the flume, game over dude. Your job is to prevent the marbles from getting to the end.
How do you prevent the marbles from getting to the end you ask? Well that’s simple, you have a little marble shooter at the bottom of the screen and your job is to get three or more of the same colored marbles together. Once this happens they go poof and disappear. If there are already 2 or more marbles of the same color next to each other, all you have to do is hit them with the same colored marble. Simple eh? Well if they were going slowly in a straight line that might be true, but the flumes curve around, cross over themselves, go through tunnels and generally twist and turn in ways that make it difficult to get a clear shot at times.
Sometimes you get special bonus power marbles that will do special things for you like blow up like a grenade and take out large sections of the marble conga line, some of them will cause the marbles to go in reverse, others cause the line to stop completely.
The game is laid out in a series of levels, each with a number of phases to complete before you can advance to the next level. And each level gets progressively harder, not only in the patterns of the flumes, but also in the speed the marbles move and the number of colors you have to deal with. Every couple of levels or so, a new color is added which makes it that much harder to get your matches lined up and the marbles to go poof.
The game-play goes from slow and easy to fast and furious to completely mind-boglingly insane action as you furiously try to prevent the line of marbles from reaching the end. This is especially true when there are two separate lines going at the same time…
The background imagery that is used in the game is all Egyptian in style and quite beautiful. I am very impressed with some of the artwork that was created for the game. That and I like that style of art to begin with.
Its good for all age groups, my children don’t get beyond about the 2nd or 3rd levels but they have fun with what they can do. As an action oriented puzzle game Luxor: The Wrath of Set has quickly become my favorite game so far for the PSP.
I've been gaming since the days of the original TSR D&D and have grown up playing just about every PnP RPG created. Eventually with the age of computers, I started getting into RTS and military strategy games. And then came the MMORPG Asherons Call which changed my computer gaming forever. These days when i'm not gaming I'm working with the Los Padre's Council BSA and my son's Cub Pack - when not conquering the virtual world.
