Secrets of Olympus

One of the richest and most varied histories in the world is that of Greece, along with that of Egypt and Japan... And many others, but for now we'd better stop listing. All we care now is about Greece...

Well, since we're on this subject, history really doesn't matter much, especially when many see in these tales of antiquity only 300 Spartans, beautiful women or treasures. But we don't have any of them... All we have is a tile-matching puzzle with a new name that wants to impress with a respected location among the ancient Greek Gods, Olympus.

Anyway, first things first. As you start the game you'll learn quickly that you can choose between a pair of game modes, Adventure and Relaxed and the same number of play styles, meaning Switch and Click. You can pretty much guess what both of them do. Switch will make you... switch the tile in order to swap other same-colored-tiles from a block. The Click version makes you click a lot of times, swapping from three to more tiles that have the same color and shape from the block making them vanish and making room for others that will fall on the grid.

Well, if you think that this game will be over quickly, think again. In each style of the game you have to go through 150 levels that are not that easy. This can be a good thing, but a bad thing too and you'll see why.

Going back, maybe you don't realize what you have to do in this game. Well, a level will be won when you "clean" the entire board from the "rocks". These rocks are basically some pixeled things, different from the rock-tiles you have on your board and these must be destroyed. When all those block-rocks are gone, the level is won and you move to another similar challenge.

In this quest you will have a little help too. There are some bonuses like the dynamites that explode when they are clicked. The dynamites can unblock a tight situation in which you don't have enough pairs to match or swap, or when a damn block-rock won't go off your board. But those situations are pretty rare, so when you get a dynamite around the block-rocks just click it.

There are also powerful magic spells. One of them is the lightning beam that will destroy an entire vertical row. Another one is the "giant fist" that will pretty much smash a whole section from your board - this is more or less what the dynamite does...

But your biggest enemy in this game is time. You'll find that in the Click style game, you can easily win some levels, but playing the Switch style will make you go nuts. The bummer is that levels are very long to finish and the gameplay gets boring. Also you'll experience a bit of frustration when you lose a game over and over again, because the time is up... again!

Then, there is another problem: the empty squares, that by the way have another issue - you can't swap tiles into those unless certain blocks are first removed. Then you have the little mini-games, like Hangman, that will leave you with a bitter taste because the game makers chose some strange words that I'm not sure even exist.

And what was even worse... There is no storyline, you just go and swap and click colored pixeled stones and make them explode until you... wanna go and see again "300" so you can take a look at Greece with other eyes.

In this case you pretty much have to ask yourself if you really want to own this game, because for me a demo did just great. With all the great visual graphics and pretty much stunning backgrounds the game has a long way to go. There is a difference between being annoying and being challenging. Personally this one made me tired and bored and I did not care much about the secrets of Olympus.

See for yourself if you care more...