Mini Game Review - Tap Jewels for X1000!

It's great to be back blogging about AmigaOne X1000 related stuff again.

After turning on my X1000 today, I noticed that game developers AmiBoing has brought out a new game for AmigaOS4 called Tap Jewels.

As regular readers may know I previously reviewed another game from Amiboing called Swamp Defence here.

Tap Jewels is a puzzle game and is great for a quick game when you have a few free minutes to play a game. I found it is quite a lot of fun once you get into it!

This game runs in a window on the AmigaOS4 workbench screen. Unfortunately there is no option to run it full screen. I hope it is added in the future, though I should stress it isn't that important given the type of game it is.

As with all the AmiBoing games I am quite impressed with the quality of the graphics - they look great, bright and detailed.

The gameplay is essentially clicking on similar jewels that are next to each other, which then removes them from the board and new random jewels are added. Below is a screenshot of the gameplay in Survival mode:

There are special items that appear from time to time also, which when clicked clean out that item's row, column for example.

There are three gameplay modes - Puzzle Quest, Survival and Time Challenge. The game itself has a How To Play section which explains well how each mode works so you can hit the ground running, as shown below:

Below is a Puzzle Quest mode game in progress. not doing too well at this point:

I admit I found the Survival mode the most fun of the three, as I prefer the no time limit and the extra difficulty of selecting 3 or more jewels to prevent running out of life (and thus ending the game).

There are also awards than can be unlocked when you reach certain scores or achievements in the game. Unfortunately I wasn't good enough to get one yet! The awards are shown below:

My personal opinion is that the background music is quite repetitive, but fortunately there is an option to turn it off at the main menu and just have sound fx.

As with other AmiBoing games, Tap Jewels high score system is linked to your user id on AmiBoing's website to register high scores for all players around the world. You are prompted for your AmiBoing userid and password when launching Tap Jewels and you can also opt to play in offline mode where the scores are not uploaded. As you can see below I am not at the top of the high score list yet but I am working my way up as I get better!

In summary, for 8 Euro (around AUD$11) it was worth the money to buy Tap Jewels. There is a free demo of the Tap Jewels available on their website if you want to try it out first.

I am glad to see new games are still being released for the Amiga in 2012 and I encourage AmigaOS4 users to support AmiBoing by buying their games and encourage further games to be developed! For me personally I would love to see a good car racing game - any takers? :-)

Anyway, I will go back now and give Tap Jewels another go and see if I can beat that top score in Survival mode...