Oh no, not another puzzle game! Sometimes, it’s like I can’t get away from them, but I think that the mood for playing a certain type of game is a bit like dealing with cravings: sometimes you want chocolate, sometimes you want chips, and in my case, I’ve been having a sweet tooth for puzzle games.
The press release for Rainbow Web caught my attention for two reasons: a little comparison to Zuma (which is another of my favorites) and the sheer fact of the game being another puzzle game. But not just another puzzle game!
In Rainbow Web, your purpose is to help restore the beautiful Rainbow Kingdom of elves and fairies back to its former glory, freeing it from the entangled spell of the great wizard Spider. Puzzle by puzzle, you will free a new part of the scenery, thus recovering the landmarks and placing them on the world map.
The game is composed of 60 challenging levels, where you must swap adjacent gems around to create combinations of three or more of the same color, horizontally or vertically. The ultimate purpose in each puzzle is to uncover the words that create the name of the scene. To uncover the name you need to create color combos that include the gems with the letters. A color combo will burst and add points to your score, leaving room for more gems to emerge from the center of the web, pushing the existing gems towards the edge of it.
Of course, there is a time limit to get all the letters. Your timer is imaginatively represented by a lizard’s tongue, fully stretched out. If the tongue retreats back into the lizard’s mouth, time ends. However, you have three continues after your time is up, to pick up where you left off and retry that scenery again.
If you get stuck for a long time without making a move, the game will show you a possible move by flashing the gems you can swap. There are also hints in the form of colored links that show two gems next to each other, waiting for a third to form a combo.
As you level up, the difficulty of the puzzles increases. You will come across strange webs with broken links and dead-ends to complicate your puzzle solving. It’s quite the challenge to get a color combo when a letter is at one of these dead-ends, and there are a total of 60 levels to got through, so there is enough gem-swapping to keep you busy for a long time.
I really enjoyed the colorful graphics of the puzzle webs, and the sceneries themselves are gorgeous. The music is also very well done and extremely pleasant to hear.
Rainbow Web is a great color-combo, gem-swapping brain teaser that every puzzle fan will certainly enjoy. If you are wandering what the hell can this puzzler have that others don’t, you can try it out by downloading the free trial at the official site. I’m sure you will be entangled in a matter of seconds.
Minimum System Requirements:
- Pentium 800 MHz or better
- Windows 98/ME/2000/2003/XP
- DirectX 7.0 or better
- 20 Mb free hard drive space