Lawrence.com

Since the recent dawn of Sony's PSP, the Nintendo DS has had a significant shadow cast upon it. Whether deserved or not, PSP's launch has brought excitement to its 20+ launch titles and the DS has hardly seen anything. Two of the PSP's launch titles are puzzle games. Lumines, a Tetris-inspired square fusion game has been the critical darling when Mercury, a 3D Marble Madness-ish puzzler should be getting the better chunk of the acclaim. The DS now tries to fight its way into the recent puzzle frenzy with Polarium.

Like Lumines, Polarium is a very simple puzzle game in which there is very little learning curve. Unlike Lumines, the premise in more engaging, more intense and a whole lot more fun. The object of the game is to use the stylus to draw lines across black and white tiles to flip them over. In other words, reverse their polarity. When you get a horizontal line to be all white or all black, it disappears.

In Challenge mode, lines fall like Tetris, forcing you to draw lines and reverse polarity in order to continuously clear lines for points. The more you clear at a time, the better you'll do. There are ten levels of difficulty and level one is the hardest level one in a puzzle game in recent memory. You have to be quick on the draw. Pun intended. There isn't much time for you to strategize for the big score, so at first you'll find yourself drawing straight lines at a time at a frenetic pace in the hopes that your play area doesn't fill up too quickly. This is much harder than it sounds. Once you get the hang of the drawing aspect, Challenge mode becomes increasingly more bearable, allowing for the fun to increase exponentially. So it's probably a better idea to get your brain trained on the many different ways to draw lines in Puzzle mode.

Puzzle mode is very different from Challenge mode. Where Challenge is a vigorous race against the clock with unlimited lines to draw, Puzzle mode gives you all the time in the world, but you must get all horizontal polarities to match by drawing only one line. To make the possibilities for puzzles increase, there is a gray border surrounding the puzzle, allowing your line to venture away from the black and white tiles to give you some breathing room. Once you've drawn a line in a square, you can't use that square again in your path, so think carefully. Once you get to the end of your drawn path, you simple tap your final square again to flip all of the tiles in your path to see if all horizontal polarities match. There are 100 stock puzzles in groups of ten. Unfortunately, if you get stumped on, say, puzzle 36, you can't unlock 40-49 until 30-39 are complete. That kinda sucks. As you draw your line path, you can backtrack on the fly by dragging backwards along the path or simply tap a square as far back on the path where you'd like to restart. The mechanic works smoothly and takes hardly any time to get accustomed to.

The wireless multiplayer works really well. As you clear lines, they'll appear on your opponent's screen, which is actually shown on the upper part of your DS. If you clear lines with question marks, you are awarded power-ups that reverse opponent's tiles, make your lines clear faster or even block the opponent's border. Although multiplayer is pretty cool, I wish you could battle the CPU in this mode. Polarium suffers from a lack of modes for a modern puzzler.

To extend the life of Polarium, you can create your own puzzles if you have the time. Then you can share them wirelessly with your friends, challenging them to think of something better.

That's all you get from Polarium. No more. No less. There is a short supply of bells and whistles that come with the package, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the title really feels barebones. The two-tone graphics with a dash of reds and blues and 4-bit-looking interface don't help the aesthetic value, especially when people are looking toward flashy PSP titles these days and people are still trying to find reasons to buy, or keep, a DS. The sound follows the same footsteps, using very muted and minimal effects to get any excitement across.

Regardless, Polarium's main gameplay is solid as a rock and proves to be more rewarding than Lumines. The only drawback is the lack of modes and the initial hump you have to overcome in the Challenge difficulty. But I wouldn't hesitate to put Polarium on your DS priority list.

Graphics: C-

Sound: C

First Play: A-

Last Play: A-

Gameplay: A

Overall: 90% A-