  Polarium's new graphics engine incorporates the latest advancements in Colour Management and Megatouch Technology. Or something. |
There's always room in the gaming world for an easy-to-pick-up, easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master puzzle game. Nintendo DS fans now have their own choice in this genre with Polarium, a game that is black and white in the most literal sense.
Polarium is a little bit Tetris, a little bit Othello and a little bit Ikaruga. The basic idea of Polarium is to change your board full of black and white blocks into lines of the same colour using your stylus. When you make a solid line, it disappears and you can move on to eliminating more.
The game throws a wrench into your plans with the 'Puzzle' mode. In this mode, you're given predetermined puzzle sets that you have to erase in one move and one move only. The lines you make can and sometimes must span a large portion of the board, but if you leave even one stray, unmatched black or white block, you fail and will be forced to attempt the puzzle again. The beauty part is that if you're really stuck on one puzzle, you can skip ahead a little bit and attempt others, going back to unfinished puzzles at your leisure.
The other main game type is 'Challenge' mode, where four rows of black and white blocks fall from the top screen to the bottom screen, similar to Tetris. You can make as many moves as you want to delete lines, but you have to keep everything below a red line that sits atop the upper DS screen. Despite its name, Challenge mode isn't very challenging, but I found that playing this game type was a great way to calm down if I was getting frustrated in Puzzle mode.
There is also a custom puzzle maker that you can share with other Polarium players, as well as a two-player mode using a DS wireless link or the single-card download play. The puzzle maker is extremely easy to use and adds a little more replayability to Polarium.
There really isn't a lot to this game, but that doesn't mean it's bad. The graphics look like they would fit right in on the original NES, and the music is simple (and really quite annoying after a while - thank you volume controls), but it's still a lot of fun. It can get frustrating (the Puzzle mode goes from quite easy to quite difficult in a very short amount of time), but that's what makes the game so great - the sense of satisfaction after completing a puzzle you've been agonizing over for hours is enormous.
Polarium isn't for just any casual gamer, but it's so easy to learn that pretty much anyone can pick up the basics. After that, it's just a matter of how much patience a person has.
