After five successful game releases this year, PlayFirst manages to surprise me yet again with another awesome game.
I can’t even begin to tell you how exciting it was to receive a preview copy of Trijinx before it was released. Even before seeing it I was already dying of curiosity knowing it was a puzzle game, and I just love puzzle games. I can tell you that I didn’t stop playing until I reached level 30 and started losing on the same puzzle over and over from running out of time. But that was just a “pit stop” since I’m now stuck on level 47!
The adventure in Trijinx begins with a cartoon intro, much like in Diner Dash and Oasis, but with the difference of having great voice acting to accompany the story this time around.
It is 1935, and Kristine is in Egypt visiting her father, a famous archeologist. We find that he ends up missing, and Kristine is forced to explore the tomb of Triclops, an Egyptian prince rumored to have been born with three eyes. She must solve puzzles to advance from chamber to chamber, in order to find what happened to her father and to lift the curse that has fell upon her friend the Professor.
The gameplay is very simple. Colored triangular tiles fall from the top of the screen into the puzzle board area. You must clear combos of 3 or more tiles of the same color by clicking on them, enough to fill the respective urns up top. You can rotate the board either way with the arrow keys to move the tiles and rearrange them to form more color combos.
There are some special pieces that can make your life easier (and sometimes not) along the way. Here are a few:
- Bombs. If you form a large triangle from 4 smaller triangles of the same color together, the piece will turn into a bomb. Use it to explode stone blocks.
- Scarabs. If you click three groups of the same color in a row, you get a scarab. Scarabs will get rid all of the pieces of their color in the puzzle board.
- Multi-colored triangles. These act as a wild card and you can use as any color.
- Eye triangles. These pieces are constantly changing colors and you can use them to complete color combos.
There are also a couple of special bonuses that I found. If you happen to clear your puzzle board (no pieces sitting on the bottom) you get a 10,000 points bonus. You can still have pieces falling down, although those don’t count for the clear bonus. If you manage to put 6 pieces together forming a hexagon, you gain 15,000 bonus points (wheel bonus).
Trijinx also has additional game modes, arcade and puzzle. In arcade mode, you try to get the best possible score for each puzzle before time runs out. In puzzle mode, you can pick between strategy (clear boards until your reserve is empty) and shape match (where you find the respective given shapes on the puzzle board).
A bit like a triangular “Collapse”, Trijinx is a very addictive game that will keep puzzle game fans entertained for hours on end. And it’s just so easy to pick up and play! The enjoyable Egyptian-style music gives it a mysterious setting that suits the creative story perfectly, and the variety of puzzles (68 in total, spread over the several levels of the adventure) will certainly keep your fingers busy in a frenzy of mouse-clicking and arrow-key-mashing. Try it out!
Trijinx: A Kristine Kross Mystery is now on my top 3 puzzle games ever, up there with Tetris and Columns (my first puzzle addictions). Just don’t ask me to pick one over the other, as they are all different, but equally good in all their “puzzleness”.
Special thanks to Kirem Weers at Alta PR and PlayFirst for providing the full version of the game.
Minimum System Requirements:
- Windows 98, 2000, ME or XP
- Pentium III 600 MHz
- 128 MB RAM (256MB for Windows 2000 and XP)
- 12 MB available disk space