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Contrary to popular belief, we here at Gamezebo Towers are easy to please: All we require for a title to score highly in our rankings is that it be fun and accessible. Unfortunately, familiar and engaging as its base concept proves, new tile-matching puzzler Ancient Wonderland is forcing us to add new criteria to the list: Namely, that games submitted for evaluation be comprehensible and in English to boot.Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. What you have here is basically a typical pattern-making mindbender, wherein you're asked to click and drag your mouse across chains of three or more like-colored, honeycomb-shaped tiles to remove them from each self-contained board. In Quest Mode, you'll attempt to complete a series of stages by collecting a set number of gems that randomly appear on various playing pieces. In Puzzle mode, the goal is simply to remove all tiles from the screen. The bizarre "Add-Ons mode" challenges you to clear the level by eliminating paper, rock and scissors-bearing pieces in the order they'd correspondingly win a game of game of (you guessed it) "paper, scissors, rock."
Suffice it to say that if the setup seems to be a bit bizarre from the outset, get ready for even more head-scratching moments... Neither the storyline (something to do with ancient Chinese gods, alchemy and Asian mysticism); actual play (which never even presents a tutorial to explain things as basic as power-up usage); or menus (including rampant misspellings, e.g. the "Pulzze" [sic] high-score table) make much sense either. But hey, with helpful item descriptions like "Question Mark block can be connected, and when the Question Mark block was eliminated it would turn to common block with stochastic color," what can we say? Someone obviously forgot to properly localize the title from its native Chinese dialect, resulting in an adventure that's sure to perplex and aggravate experienced casual gamers, let alone desktop neophytes. Read more...
