Polarium
Simplicity Felicity?
Tags: Polarium Categories: GBA Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Jake McNeill on May 12th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Polarium (title page) | 2 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Puzzle | No | ||
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The Nintendo DS seems to have become a mecca of simplistic games. While the best games on the system remain titles like Super Mario 64 DS and Metroid Prime: Hunters, the vast majority of titles to hit Nintendo’s highly touchable handheld have followed a philosophy of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!), with varying results. Because of this, Polarium seems the ultimate representation of this trend, as it is as simple as they come, and that yields varying results.
Picture a screen of black and white tiles. Drawing a line over them and then tapping the end flips those tiles to the opposite color, like Othello. Creating a horizontal row of like-colored tiles clears them from the screen, like Tetris. And because it’s generally faster to create one big line than multiple smaller lines, you’re heavily encouraged to be efficient in your movements, either to save time or because it’s flat-out required. The edges of the screen are covered with gray tiles where you can continue to draw your line without worrying about hitting any tiles that you don’t want to flip. Oh, and you can’t draw over your own line until you clear it first.
That’s it.
 |
No, really, go back up and read that again, because that’s pretty much the entire game. All that’s left to explain are the different game modes, and even that shouldn’t take long. Challenge mode has rows of blocks falling from the top like Tetris. Puzzle mode has a hundred puzzles that each must be cleared using only one line (as well as the ability to create a ton of your own and send them to a friend, which is pretty cool). Multiplayer mode take’s Polarium’s gameplay and mixes it with rules vaguely like Tetris (but with bonus pieces that have various effects when you use them).
That’s it.
No, really, go back up and read that again, because that paragraph and the first one encompass the entire game. There is nothing in this game that was not described in those two paragraphs (Okay, I left out the tutorial and options menu, if you wanna’ get technical). Don’t lose interest just yet, though. Tetris was even simpler, and it’s arguably the best videogame ever created.
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As I’ve previously stated, any game that lacks depth and variety needs to make up for it with strength of game design, and being that Polarium has an obviously massive lack of depth and variety, its design needs to be utterly timeless to compensate. Unfortunately, there are issues that really keep this game from being timeless, and the most major one is that even though the gameplay is simple, when things get rough, the solutions become far less obvious.
This is understandable in the puzzle mode, albeit somewhat frustrating, but in Challenge mode, where you don’t have ten minutes to study the screen (you don’t even have ten seconds), you’ll look at a jumble of black and white tiles that comes down and have no idea what path to draw through it to get every row to turn either black or white. By contrast, when things got fast in Tetris, you still knew exactly where to put pieces. It was just a matter of getting them there in time.
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Also bothersome are some decisions made with the gameplay mechanics in challenge mode. When you clear a row, it takes a moment to drop the rest of the pile down. If you try to draw another line before it drops, that line doesn’t move down with the pile, nor will it let you clear it before the drop. Best-case scenario, you’ll have wasted valuable time. Worst-case scenario, you’ll accidentally flip the wrong tiles, creating an even bigger mess.
So, it’s not as timeless as Tetris, but even so, it would be a simple matter to spice up the gameplay with a good amount of options. You know, unlockable music, maybe some different tilesets (or at least different colors). Nope. The game’s music is limited to a few unoffensive (but completely unmemorable) themes, and the only colors you will ever see here are black, white and gray (with yellow and red highlights of cursors and active lines, and blue erase buttons on either side). There is little animation, and ultimately little personality. Compared with Lumines on the PSP, a game bursting at the seams with life and beauty, and full of tons of music and visuals to choose from, and Polarium seems… well, simple, and not in a good way.
The basic gameplay underneath is still pretty darn good, but it seems like the philosophy of simplicity got to the designers’ heads when they were making this game, and it spread from the core gameplay to the rest of the game like a cancer, depriving the gamer of options, variety, and personality. As a result, what could have been one of the best games on the DS is just another interesting little distraction.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ At its core, fantastic gameplay + Sending custom puzzles to other players is something every puzzle game should do + It's... really simple |
7.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Too simple. There's not enough gameplay options. - There's not enough variety. - There's nothing impressive in the graphics and sound. Nothing. - In fact, there's really no personality here at all. |
|
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Polarium is a very good idea for a puzzle game, without the options, variety, graphics, sound, or personality to back it up. A good way to kill ten minutes, but not worth a $30 price tag. | |
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Tags: Polarium
Posted by Jake McNeill on May 12th, 2005 and is filed under GBA Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
