Treasures of Montezuma Blitz

There's been so many clones of Bejeweled at this point that you'd think it would be pretty hard to fuck one up. You'd think, anyway.

Treasures of Montezuma Blitz isn't awful by any stretch, but it makes a few big mistakes in major areas that are bewildering for a game walking down such a well-trodden path. The display, for one thing - it should be reasonably obvious that the main feature any game of this type should have, graphically, is brightness, allowing the player to instantly pick out the colours of the gems to match them up, yet ToMB's color palette is weirdly dull and lifeless, making it awkward to tell where the matches are meant to be. There are powerups throughout the game that make this even worse, as they hover in front of gems, obscuring their colour.

And then when you do work out what's meant to go where, the touchscreen controls are fiddly and, sometimes, way off. It's instinctual to blame this on the hardware rather than the software, but compare Treasures of Montezuma Blitz to something like Little Deviants, which called for way more precision on the touchscreen on both the front and rear pad and never got this bad, and you have to conclude that it's the coding of the game that's gone awry. Again, it's not awful, but it's far enough way from 'good' to be noticeable.

Then again, it is free, I guess. In the absence of anything else like it on the Vita it's acceptable, but if you own a smartphone and use it for gaming, chances are you've already got something similar and better on there. It doesn't take a lot for a game like this to stop feeling like a game and start feeling like a time sink, and unfortunately, that's a line Treasures of Montezuma Blitz crosses.