Cradle of Persia
Score: 78% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Rising Star Games Developer: cerasus.media Media: Cartridge/1 Players: 1 Genre: Puzzle
Graphics & Sound: Cradle of Persia is the latest game in the Cradle of series, and while the game plays very similarly to other match-three titles, this one has a few variations on the theme to keep things interesting. The game displays the board on the bottom screen, while the top screen shows items like the current amount of money, building materials and food you've gathered, as well as how much time you have left in the level. The gameboard itself feels small and a bit rough around the edges, but it gets the job done. The tiles that you are switching around are identifiable and can't be easily confused with one another, but based on the size of the tiles, you will definitely be using your stylus in this game. Cradle of Persia is set to generic Middle-Eastern music that you would find in pretty much any Greek and Lebanese restaurant, and while it doesn't get in the way, it doesn't do anything to really stand out either. The same goes for the generic sound effects that play when you collapse tiles or when your time starts to wind down.
Gameplay: At its core, Cradle of Persia is a basic match-three puzzle game with goals similar to Jewel Quest. Clearing tiles will actually change the color of the spaces underneath and you've beaten a level once you've changed all of the tiles to the correct color. I would say once you've cleared all the tiles, but the game adds multiple layers of colors in order to increase the difficulty, but more on that later. The game throws you in these puzzles in order to earn money and resources so that you can buy various buildings for your budding civilization. These buildings not only increase the amount of resources you can gather in a single puzzle, but they march you ever closer to the next epoch in the game's timeline. Basically, you will play the match-three game several times until you earn enough resources to buy the next available building. When you go to buy the building, you then play a slide-puzzle mini-game to fix the picture of that building, and then you will get whatever boons that new asset offers. After that, you play some more match-three puzzles until you earn enough resources for the next building and eventually, you earn a new power up when you've completed that stage of the game.
Difficulty: Cradle of Persia's difficulty comes in the complexity of the gameboards it throws at you. Some are fairly simple patterns that are fairly straightforward, but as the game goes on, you will encounter boards that have odd shapes to them, or rows sticking out of the sides or even holes in the board that you must work around. The game also increases the difficulty by adding tiles that are locked down so that you will have to clear them several times. This is done in a couple of ways. One way has the tile simply being a different color, so you will have to clear it normally multiple times, but the other has the pieces actually holding the tiles above it back so that there are areas of the board that are not filled in until those particular tiles have been unlocked. The combination of locked tiles and the different gameboard shapes creates a lot of different puzzles for the developers to throw at you. As a result, one thing that Cradle of Persia does well is gradually stepping up the difficulty in a way that you feel eased into the tougher puzzles rather than simply being thrown into the deep end after wading in the kiddie pool for a while.
Game Mechanics: Most match-three games are the same, it's the little differences between the games that make them stand out or blend in with the crowd. Like the other Cradle of games, Cradle of Persia's main difference comes in how the pieces fall when you've cleared a set of tiles. Where most games simply take the rows above the cleared blocks and drop them down vertically, Cradle of Persia has the falling pieces fall in a more flowing manner, something that might not be obvious on a standard rectangular board, but when you add holes to the board or even locked tiles, this difference is very evident. I found this made the game slightly less predictable than most match-three titles. There are some times when I would try and plan a few moves in advance in order to navigate a piece where I needed it in order to clear a particularly tough niche on the board, only to find the tile I wanted would slide in an unexpected direction and usually not where I was hoping it would be. This didn't make the game more frustrating, it just made me have to rethink my strategy. Cradle of Persia is a fun puzzle game, and given the fact that it has 100 boards to present to the player, there is a lot of playtime in this title. That being said, there isn't a lot of replayability, so one long car trip and you could blow through most of what Cradle of Persia has to offer.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Related Links: Cradle of Persia Official Homepage Buy Cradle of Persia at Amazon Game Vortex’s Review of Cradle of Rome on the DS
Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart Collector's Edition Retro/Grade