Brilliant expansion of the DS game
Polarium is a game with a simple concept: you're given a pattern of white and black blocks, and your tool is the ability to draw a line through it. Each block it passes through switches color. To clear a puzzle, you need to use one unbroken line to fix all of the rows of blocks on-screen so that each individual row is either all black or all white. If you've played the DS version before, you probably remember that it was challenging, but kind of stark and repetitive. With no special blocks to break up the black-and-white monotony, it got kind of tiring. The stylus control was a good showcase of the DS's abilities, but it was also easy to mess up with all those tiny squares, not to mention you could be blocking your line of sight.
The GBA game fixes all of this. You can change the 'skin' of the blocks you're playing with in the 365-puzzle Daily Mode (which you can play straight - there's no limit to how much you can do in a day), which lets you add a dash of color if you want it. Plus there are new blocks to add to the challenge. When you clear a row of hurdle blocks, everything above it falls into the spaces below. If they don't also make rows of the same color, then you have to change your approach. You'll also get X'ed out blocks in corners and along the edges of the field, which may force you to rethink a puzzle that would have been easy otherwise. Finally, there are Joker tiles, which are not affected by your color-changing line and instead turn into the color of the solid tiles only if they're all the same color.
There's more, too. The first time through a puzzle, you can do it any way you want. Then you can go through it again, and you'll get two markers on the screen. You must start at one marker and end at the other, and you have a limit on the number of blocks you can pass through. You'll first wonder how the heck you're going to solve it that way, but once you figure it out, you'll find it's actually the shortest way to solve the puzzle. Also, when you clear a screen and still have 10 moves left, that's a proud moment.
Great game, far superior to the DS version and highly recommendable for the $20 MSRP.
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