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Get ready to lose your marbles over Magnetica!
If you have ever played Puzz Loop or its more famous clone, Zuma, you will feel right at home playing Magnetica.
The gameplay is the same as any previous versions of this title, whatever you may know them as. The chain keeps coming and you have to launch the marbles onto it, forming color combos of three or more marbles and creating chain reactions to make the chain smaller and keep it from reaching the end of the line. The major difference is that now you get to use the stylus on the touch screen to flick the marbles onto the chain. Pretty cool, huh?
But Magnetica gets better than just being “touchy”.
Obstacles and special items make the game so much more than Puzz Loop (or any clone of it, for that matter). There are slots that you can aim at and land in to get the slot machine going and spin for a chance at a special item. There are detonators that clear all marbles of the same color of the marble they hit. There are yellow stopwatches that slow down the chain and red stopwatches that stop it for a short period of time. There are switches on the tracks that make your chain go a different direction. There are also rockets that push everything in front of them towards the end of the line fairly quick.
And many times – and these are probably the most challenging (or frustrating, depending how you look at it) of stages, since things can go downhill pretty fast – you will have several launchers and several different tracks, each with a different chain. There are more obstacles, but I’ll talk about them a little later.
Magnetica offers three single-player modes. Challenge mode is a single stage where you survive for as long as you can as the chain gradually speeds up. Each stage has 99 levels, and if you manage to stay alive that long, you clear the puzzle. There are four difficulties for each Challenge mode stage.
Quest is a mission-based mode where you only have access to the next puzzle once you complete the previous one. The objective of each Quest stage is to clear all the marbles from the chain. Every ten Quest levels you get a bonus level where you have to do a number of different things, all involving launching marbles of course. In the first boss, you have to hit it so it drops coins, and you collect as many as possible; in the second boss, you have to destroy the marble chain around it; the third, well, I’m not there yet, but no one said Quest mode was easy!
Puzzle mode brings you a series of mind-boggling chains and a pre-set number and colors of marbles to use on them. You have to use all of the given marbles in the order they appear to set the marble chain so it clears itself by forming consecutive combos. Clear the chain and get rid of all the marbles to complete the puzzle. Initially, there are only ten puzzles, but more will be unlocked as you solve existing ones.
Quite a bit of the game’s magnetism resides in the versus multiplayer feature, either over wireless connection or DS Download Play.
Versus mode picks up single-player obstacles and turns them into tricks that you can use against your adversary. To begin a Versus match, you choose the rail shape, the time limit, pick if you want to use attack items or not, and then add a handicap level. The handicap is basically the amount of bearings (the clear marbles that are destroyed when you create color matches next to them) that you send your oponent when you make chain combos.
If you thought single-player had enough special items, check out the Versus mode attack items: Ion Clouds that create smoke screens (though if you blow on them, they go away); Gravitons that alter the trajectory of your opponent’s marbles; Viruses that turn marbles into bearings; Black Holes that swallow your opponent’s marbles; Recoils that form marble-deflecting barriers. It somehow reminds me of the goold old days of playing Tetrinet.
Magnetica is basically a reinvented formula of an old classic puzzle game (the original Puzz Loop dates from the late 90’s) that requires you to have quick reflexes. The colorful and bright graphics, upbeat music, easy to use interface, and great touch screen recognition have me attracted to the DS like a magnet.
The only thing that may turn off any puzzle game enthusiasts is its price, as Magnetica is not a budget title. If that’s your case, wait until it comes down and then get yourself a copy. Until then, see if you can find someone who has it and experience the game through Download Play, otherwise you’ll only be missing out on a great and addictive puzzle game.
Special thanks to Allison Guillen and Nintendo for providing a copy of this title.