Count Victus reviews Bejeweled 3
It’s not often between my writings of novels, various lab experiments and child raising that I get to play games, but when I heard they’d be making a sequel to my favorite series - Bejeweled - you can be sure that I set aside some time for this. I’ve recently completed it.
First off, there’s a story now. A background narrative, anyway. I’ve escaped to a sparkling new world full of trees, floating castles, and unicorns. (the good kind) You are a magical fairy princess that must match jewels up together in various game modes, with Zen being my favorite. After a day of hearing nothing but screams from the abyss and seeing nothing but horrors encroaching towards my castle walls, it’s so relaxing to load up Bejeweled’s Zen mode and infinitely piece together jewel combinations. It helps me sleep easier, too.
All the hype is true - this really is the brightest Bejeweled available to consumers. I’m not sure how it is even possible to create a brighter version without harnessing the power of some ethereal, radiant shard of… goodness. My graphic processing unit hit maximum temperature for this version.
There’s a new badge system, but it hasn’t appealed to me very much because I’ve mostly been playing Zen mode and have earned the top badge for 1,000 consecutive matchups. There are about 500 badges, and I question how necessary some of them are. For example, I’m all for getting a badge for managing to quit after a three-hour period, but I’m not sure how I feel about the badge you receive when the game assumes you’ve collapsed after being open for 16 hours without response from the player.
But 500 billion players can’t be wrong - this is the greatest puzzle game ever created. My only complaint is that I’ll never want to go back to another version of Bejeweled again!
10 eyeless nightmares murmuring blindly in the eternal quagmire out of 10.
