Review: The treasures of Montezuma 2 for the iPhone/iPod Touch

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I’ll admit it. I really like playing games on the iPhone.  This time around, Alawar Games sent me a copy of Montezuma 2 to take a look at. So again, I’ll make an a small admission and mention that I never played the original Montezuma, but I have played many of these match-three type of games like “Bejeweled” or “Alchemize”. So let’s take a look at this one!

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As I mentioned, Montezuma 2 is a match-three type of game.  Also, like many of these game, there are a number of different power-ups and specialized pieces that help you in meeting the goals of the game and removing pieces from the board.

For those not familiar with match-three types of games the premise is simple;  You try to swap pieces on the board with adjacent pieces to form rows or chains of three or more like pieces.   When these line up, they disappear from the game board, things slide down to fill in the open spots, and game play continues!  In most of the IPhone/IPT games I’ve seen like this, you swap the pieces simply by swiping your finder across the two pieces you want to swap.  That’s it!

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The Treasures of Montezuma 2 offers you 3 different modes of play:  Adventure, Endless, and Puzzle.

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In the “Adventure” mode you must remove a certain amount from the game board while earning coins.  You use the coins to help you buy items to build up your “town” which, in turn, gives you more special items to help eliminate more pieces from the board.   There are a total of 120 levels available to you in Adventure mode.

The “Endless” mode is exactly what it sounds like.  It keeps playing until there are no more possible moves available to you.

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The “Puzzle” mode allows you to complete up to 40 levels of puzzles with specific goals for completion.

There are three difficulty levels to choose from and you can use a male or a female playing character.

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I found the game play to be fun and pretty addictive.  The graphics are really nice and smoothly executed.  If you have an iPhone 3GS or a third generation iPod Touch there are special shading effects also used to make the graphics even better.

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What I liked: I really like the overall look and feel of the game.  Everything was nice and solid.  The graphics are attractive and the adventure mode adds a nice overall goal  and progressive enhancements to the board clearing process.  It also adds nicely to the addictiveness of the game!

What could be Improved: Although there were quite a few help screens, they were mostly focused around special gems and power-ups.   There really wasn’t much help explaining basic game fundamentals or goals of the different modes.   Maybe some assumptions were made relating to having played the original treasures of Montezuma, I don’t know, but I’d like to see that improved a bit.

Overall: I am enjoying this game a lot.  The game is fun and addictive.   If you liked the original, I suspect you will like this one a lot as well.  The Treasures of Montezuma 2 is available at the AppStore for a reasonable $1.99.  Check it out!

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About the Author

Christopher Gavula
Chris has been a COBOL programmer, a desktop support technician, network engineer, telecommunications manager, and even a professional musician. Currently, he is focused on deploying Voice over IP technologies in a large, corporate setting. He started working full-time at the tender age of 14, even before there were PCs, and will probably be working and trying to finish “just one more project” as he’s lowered into the grave.