Inca Quest

Another week, another look at a mini-game that can keep you busy during a boring rainy-afternoon with nothing to do, or who knows, keep you company when an internet connection doesn't work how it's supposed to.

Question. What is the most addictive game genre? Mahjong? Shooter? Quest? The answer is pretty simple... The puzzle... And everybody knows why. When it's combined with a bit of "shooter" too and a bit of quest, nobody can refuse the offer.

This week's choice is called "Inca Quest". The story of the game is simple... A so-called Arthur Quest (no relation to Johnny Quest - if anybody remembers those cartoons), who lost his daughter in Peru, is in trouble. It is known that she has been kidnapped by a mad shaman. But things are not that simple. After crashing his plane, the Professor must make his way through ten temples in order to gain both the return of his daughter and his freedom. Well, we don't state the historical facts or something, we're not here for that, but we're here to test the game.

This has three modes: Survival, Adventure and the Puzzle. Basically the three are not that different, only the grade of difficulty has something to do with that. They also all have that action game that puts the player to match three or more like-things in order to make them disappear.

The hardest of them all is clearly the Survival mode. Even if the mechanics of the game are very simple, this part is not so necessary. You have the top of the screen littered with multi-colored discs; then you have at your disposal a cannon located at the bottom of the screen. Your mission is to fire colored discs to make matches of three or more liked-colored discs and make them disappear. Pretty easy! Just that in this mode you got some tricks too. You have "curses" (skeleton black-head-disks) coming from nowhere, that you must get rid of really quickly, otherwise they will "sicken" other disks and you'll end up without matches. The only way to get rid of black discs is to blast them with a destructive power-up or if you can, get rid of the discs above them... the "go around" situation.

You should also know that the levels of the Survival mode change with every play, so beware of the Shaman's challenges.

Other bugging elements are some stone disks that also come between you and your goal. You have to go "around" them. Even if they are easy to get rid of (those not being "contagious"), they can get pretty annoying too. But if you don't make it the first time, do not despair, you have four chances to try and clear each level. Another pro for you is that this game lets you see the next four colored discs that will be available for shooting and also to swap the order of the first two.

The story doesn't end here. There are also five main power-ups. Now that we're here, let's get to the bottom of this: the four good power-up discs are the light beams, which will allow you to see the path your disc will travel. This feature is especially useful when you want to bounce your discs off the walls.

For those who don't want to complicate things, the Adventure mode and Puzzle are available and ready at all time. These two here are not so complicated. The Puzzle mode contains 80 different puzzles. The discs are arranged at the top of the screen, but this time you have just a limited number of other discs to take them out - you didn't think it's that easy.

Now that things are pretty clear, all I can say is that the game has pretty well made graphics, well drawn comic panel, colorful and is pretty smooth. The "sound track" is not annoying and won't bug you; if you don't disable it from the Options menu, you will have just a nice mix of tribal rhythms to go in your Inca adventure.

All in all, this game is not bad at all. Enjoy!