So you are sitting there bored, but don’t have the time to get involved in a game of WOW or BF2, you want to play a game but Mine Sweeper just won’t do. There are many puzzle style games out there that offer a bit of fun, but they are all pretty much the same old thing. Today for review I have a game that is small and really a lot of fun and best of all you don’t need a high end system to play it on. It is called Jurassic Realm and it is from a small company called Enkord. Read on to learn a bit more about Jurassic Realm…
Jurassic Realm
Reviewed by: Kristofer Brozio AkA Dracos
Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:
Jurassic Realm
‘collapse meets breakout puzzle game’
Game description:
Explore prehistoric land in blockbusting dinosaur-age puzzle.
Jurassic Realm is a new and exciting action puzzle which improves collapse genre with explosive power-ups and brick-breaking mayhem. In this game you explore ancient land in search of images of long-lost dinosaurs. There is huge map available for your exploration with number of various roads and pathways to travel
System requirements:
Processor: 600 MHz or above
RAM: 128 MB
Video: 32 MB
OS: Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP with DirectX 8 installed
Price: $24.95 (download)
Enkord.com: we are dedicated to creating simple games that are fun to play by people of all ages.
A Better Look at Things
/Game Play:
As this is a downloadable video game there are no box shots for you to see, so we just jump right on into the review!
Once downloaded and installed you can click the icon that appears on your desktop, you are greeted with a title screen/main menu. There are two different game types, one is ‘Quest Mode’ the other is ‘Arcade Mode’. In the quest mode you search through various level to find the T-Rex, in the arcade mode you unlock pictures of different dinosaurs.
Clicking the options button takes us to a basic options screen, we can choose resolution, video mode, level of detail, sound volume, music volume and the language of the game.
Clicking the Quest mode button you are brought to a screen that you can select your path and also select the level of difficulty. Different paths in the game will lead you to different pictures of dinosaurs.
Clicking Arcade Mode button you are brought to a map of the island, and have to play each section to unlock the next to continue on.
The idea of the game to to smash of collapse a certain number of pieces per level, this varies on the level playing and the skill level, you have to do this in a certain amount of time. You click on three of more like objects in the game to collapse them, or course the more you collapse at one time gets you more points.
There are many levels in Jurassic Realm and they are all different, some have things you need to break by collapsing like blocks around them.
The graphics are pretty good for such a small game actually, the detail is very good on the high setting.
During the game a large arrow is your cursor, while playing sets of more than three will light up to ‘hint’ you to click on them to help you out a bit as well.
Sometimes there are objects inside of things that need to be broken, you need to surround the block with the same object that is inside in order to collapse it. There are also many other types of block to be found as well, such as exploding blocks that will explode and destroy a bunch of block around them, there are shape shifting blocks that when collapse will turn all the other pieces around it to the same block, there are ‘slime’ blocks that when collapsed will destroy the whole row they are on. There are many types of blocks and each level seems to have its own twist to it, when you first come on to some levels a box pops up telling you what you need to do in order to finish the level.
Here is about 30 seconds of actual game play I captured using FRAPS to show you better how the game plays. There is sound, so you can hear the background music and the sound effects as well
If you wish you can view at full screen, Click Here to watch in Windows Media Player.
Summary:
Its an interesting game over all but it gets a bit tedious after a while of playing it, yes it is interesting but after playing five or six levels it does get boring and it’s time to shut it off, but I did find myself going back and playing a few more levels now and again. It is a nice game to visit once in a while but not one that you will be spending hours at a time playing.
DragonSteelMods gives Jurassic Realm a 4 out of 5 score.
Pros:
-Interesting concept
-Fast paced game play
-Nice graphics
-Nice to come back and visit every once in a while
Cons:
-Can get tedious after a few levels
-Not the type of game you will spend hours playing
I would like to thank VGSmart and Enkord for the chance to review Jurassic Realm.