LUXOR 2 FREE GAMES SERIES

It takes too long to play through individual levels because they can take up to ten minutes to play through with little variation over those ten minutes. It's boring and easy, and it takes too long. Luxor isnвЂ™t as good when you canвЂ™t alt-tab it out of sight.Д«ut the chief difficulty is simply sustaining your interest. At certain points newly coloured balls are introduced, and they start to move more quickly. As the Adventure mode progresses, the game's difficulty increases: the use of perspective in some maps makes the game's snaking balls appear smaller, and more complicated maps introduce more going over and under. And if you didn't know that the Nile is very long before you played Luxor 2, boy will you know it by the time you've finished it. What that means is that each map is prefaced by a little graphic showing your progress along the Nile, and every so often your progress is punctuated by an occasional bonus round in which you fire daggers instead of balls (which means it feels more like a rudimentary Galaga clone).

LUXOR 2 FREE GAMES SERIES

The main part of the game sees a seemingly-never-ending series of these maps tied together into an Adventure mode. Luxor is a popular holiday destination, both in its own right and as a starting or finishing point for Nile cruises. Consequently, it's not always easy to tell where your coloured balls are going to end up when you fire them off. The game's balls snake inexorably around various different maps, looping over and under various obstacles, but it's not always easy to tell what they're going to go under and what they're going to go over. And it's not always easy to interpret the game's backgrounds. Equally annoyingly, pressing the Left Stick for too long will make your mystical winged scarab whizz too fast. Annoyingly, this means that whenever your Xbox decides to tell you that one of your friends has just joined you online, you can't see what coloured ball it is your thingie is firing. The main difference between this and Zuma is that the shooting thingie (or 'mystical winged scarab' as the press release puts it) whizzes along the bottom of the screen instead of rotating in the middle. Luxor is served by Luxor International Airport.

And occasionally some treasure will fall down the screen to grant you more points or extra lives. Linking together combos produces various sorts of power-up, which variously freeze or slow the advance of the coloured balls, or randomly destroy some of them.

Firing off a coloured ball to make a cluster of three or more coloured balls will make those coloured balls disappear, and as they disappear they might create a chain effect of other clusters of disappearing coloured balls - a 'combo', if you will. You shoot coloured balls at a snaking line of other coloured balls in order to make those coloured balls disappear before they go too far.

It's basically the same game as the original Luxor, which was the same game as Zuma, which was the same game as Puzz Loop, which means it's a bit like Bust-A-Move/Puzzle Bobble but different. It might be perfect for soaking up the hours in the office, but devoting your free time to it just feels wrong. Luxor 2's natural habitat is the office, tucked away in a window that can be handily alt-tabbed away when a colleague strays too close. It's even more difficult to see why someone thought such a sequel would be suited to Xbox Live (except for the fact that the associated fanfare when it went up would shift a few more micropayments).

Having played through it though, it's difficult to see why somebody thought such a sequel would be necessary. Now it has a sequel that's available on Xbox Live. It's also one of those casual games available on the internet, that also mustered a release in the shops and on the PSP.

Luxor 2 free games