LuckyCoins from SBSH

This is a review of LuckyCoins v1.11 from SBSH.

Review Conditions

LuckyCoins was installed on a Nokia E71, an S60 3rd edition FP1 device.

Installation

LuckyCoins comes as a .SIS file and can be installed using the Nokia PC Suite.

First View

SBSH has some great productivity applications for S60. We have reviewed Reminders at BestofSymbian. Now they have an arcade game for S60. But I wasn’t too hopeful that LuckyCoins will be very engaging. But I was in for a real pleasant surprise. Read on.

Main Review

LuckyCoins is simple yet a very addictive game. There is an 8 X 8 grid with 64 different tiles. The tiles can be gold and silver coins, gems, or some other icons. You can traverse freely across the grid but you can move a tile only one grid at a time in any direction. And that movement cannot be random – it can only be moved to a grid if it results in an identical group of 3 or 4 icons in the horizontal or vertical direction. This blows up the tiles and you gain points. That’s the basic gameplay. Then there are bombs that will blow up several tiles and give you more points, a clock that gives you a little more time in the level to gain more points, etc.

 

There are 5 levels, each having 5 sub-levels, totaling 25 levels. This is enough to keep you playing this for days, if not weeks.

   

Some boxes in the grids are dark brown in color. To move to a different level, you need to form groups of 3 or 4 identical icons over these brown grids and destroy them. A group of 3 may include just one brown grid too. And only when all the brown grids are blown away, you can move to the next level. I actually didn’t realize this for some time and played level 1-1 for too long. I liked the idea of the brown grids keeping you in one level – its gives a closure to each level and a sense of achievement. Accumulating a specific number points is very easy and obviously that is not enough to qualify a player to move to the next level. When there are just 1 or 2 brown grids remaining in different corners, its challenging to hunt them down and line up 3 identical icon in a row that includes one of the brown grids.

There is a Lucky Day option that lets you go to a random level and play it. In this level, instead of the brown grids, there are transparent grids that give away english alphabets are they are destroyed. These alphabets have to be accumulated to form a sentence. That’s the motivation to keep going and complete the random level.

Handling

Navigation across the grid is using the D Pad cursor. The movement of icons using the D Pad cursor is a breeze – just click to select and use the cursor to move it. The game’s layout and design has been well optimized for S60. All operations can be performed using the D Pad and the click of middle OK button (to move an icon). I didn’t get any fatigue from playing the game for several levels continuously on my mobile because of the well designed controls. You can also create a Profile for yourself and continue playing the game at the same level you left off earlier.  There is a Help section to guide newbie around. You can also track high scores for your Profile. The sounds of the tile blowing away and the background music can be reduced. That allows you can play the game in your office cubicle too

Weaknesses

I didn’t find any weaknesses. Sometimes when the points move up over the grids, the other grids are hidden for a fleeting moment and that’s a little irritating. The grid over which the D Pad is focused on has a blue border, which is not so starkly visible. I kept searching for it often.

Conclusion

LuckyCoins has proved to be addictive beyond my expectation. I am not a very keen gamer, on any platform but despite this, the game had me hooked for more days than I thought. Its available here for purchase at $7.95 or for trial. LuckyCoins is good stuff and I’d give 4 of 5.