What Luxor Quest brings to the series are more luscious graphics, a greater range of level types and more refined gameplay. Luxor has already proved itself a brilliant puzzler.
Levels also come in three different flavours - the Classic level (which is just the basic game I've just described), Survival, which puts you up against a super tight time limit, and Onslaught, in which Seth's statues pop up randomly to block your line towards the spheres and need to be hit out of the way. Towards the second half of the game, mastering the use of these becomes key to managing to finish a level since they get pretty hard. These power ups cause all sorts of effects - from sending an explosion along the track that takes out a whole trolley of spheres, to one that makes the spheres move in reverse along the track. To help you on your quest are power ups, which are released for every second sequence you match up. Your overall goal is to stop the runaway trolley of spheres before it builds enough momentum to steamroller it's way to the pyramid at the end of the track. Get three of the same colour in a row and they disappear. You simply need to line that up with a like-coloured sphere then fire it, so it sticks to the same colour. You have control of a winged scarab that you can move left and right across the bottom of the screen and which gets loaded up with one coloured sphere after another. Each level contains a pre-laid track which a sort of trolley filled with coloured spheres makes its way slowly (at least to start with) along. They're also a lot better looking: Luxor Quest looks practically next generation compared to Luxor 2, and that looked great to start with.Īesthetics aside though, Luxor's basic gameplay remains the same. So there's a sort of sky at night themed level and one that takes place in the belly of a snake, among others.
Its 30 levels, while still based around the Egyptian theme, are much more abstract than before. The ways in which Luxor Quest improves on its predecessors are mostly visual. The Luxor games simply use a winning puzzle formula (and one you might have seen before in games like Zuma) which tests the quickness of your reactions, the accuracy of your aim and your ability to make the right decision fast. There have already been two Luxor games, and both were good enough to earn Silver Awards in their retrospective reviews.