KMGR of "Cleopatra's Treasures"

Cleopatra's Treasures, also known as Pyramid Bloxx is an action puzzler from Digital Chocolate. Basically, you need to cram in as many "treasure stones" into the pyramid as possible. Each treasure stone have a requirement... The cheap ones needs to be adjacent to none or one polished side, while the expensive ones needs to be adjacent to many polished sides. You "dig" for those stones by playing two minigames: match-3 (like Bejeweled), or a "toss the rock up without dropping it" action game. It is rather difficult to describe, and it can be fun... until you get totally bored to tears.

The toss-the-rock game is cute. Basically, you start from deep in the bowels, and you need to get this treasure stone all the way to the surface. The quicker it gets there, the more time can be spent on polishing it (to have more polished facets, up to 6). However, don't drop it. The man basically runs left and right, and when you hit OK, the rock goes UP. If you hit the OK at the right time, the rock lands on the person at the level above perfectly. If you're slightly off, the person will still catch it, but will be leaning to one side, making it harder to judge the next throw upward (as it will not be a straight upward throw). The more precious the stone, the more levels you have to go up. There are special snags like earthquake, sandstorm (underground?!), monkeys and donkeys instead of people, a double-height floor where you need to use one of those "double-fly" spells, and so on. If you drop the rock three times, you have to redo the rock from scratch. The faster it goes up, the more the stone is worth.

The connect-3 / Bejeweled variation is just that... The idea is the "clear" the entire board by completing the triples, the quads, and the quints, as well as make use of those special tokens that drop in like "clear row", "extra time", and so on. You get those tokens by completing stuff better than a regular triple. By completing the board before the time runs out. The more time there is on the meter, the more time you get to "polish" the stone and the more worth it'd be.

After it's been transported to the surface, the stone must be fitted into the pyramid according to some rules... The simplest and cheapest, red ruby, has no restrictions. There are 6 others... each with MORE restrictions in the form of needing nearby polished facets. For example, the first one you do must be a red since there are no facets in the pyramid. Once you fit in two red ones (2 facets), you can then fit in a 2-facet gem (green emerald). You can even replace an existing stone with a better one if you feel you can do better.

If you don't get all this, I'd suggest watching this gameplay video:

http://www.digitalchocolate.com/games/pc/pyramid-bloxx.html

The problem mainly twofold: the connect 3 / Bejeweled, and the timing-based gameplay. The connect-3 is tired, and the color palette doesn't help, as everything is the same shape. I had to squint, and I had one of the larger screen phones (the LG VX9900 enV)! Second, I don't like timing-based gameplay. They are basically arcade games, and I am getting old. I don't have the reflexes I used to, and there should be ways to make games fun without relying on reflex, no matter how simple the controls are.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: simple controls, easy to learn
Cons: too derivative, too old, and in a sense, a bit too hard