Azkend 2: The World Beneath is a “match 3” type of puzzle game that doesn’t bring a lot of new items to the table, but the developers succeeded in creating a game that’s familiar and yet unique that keeps its players hooked for hours.
You’re an 1896 female explorer that’s on board of a ship named Celestia that travels from Liverpool to New York. During their journey a typhoon sucks the ship into the ocean and displaces the ship to a new but mysterious world full of challenges, ready to explore. Azkend 2 presents itself beautifully with its hand-painted scenery, distinctive music and soothing voice acting. These simple unexpected features within this puzzle game set the stage right when it comes to extraordinary.
The main game mechanic is all about matching tiles until every tile is colored blue and obtaining useful items such as cameras, binoculars, a compass, … and so on, all before time runs out. Once the whole stage is colored blue, you’ll obtain your item and move on to the next story chapter to collect clues about your whereabouts. To make the game interesting, it’s not all about “coloring”, there are also other challenges to overcome such as blocking bugs as they make their way to the top, freeing tiles from their freezing or even blazing cage. These puzzle modes rotate from over more than 60 stages. Some puzzles leave no room for error, so watch your step.
You’ll quickly start to notice that it isn’t all about mindless action, it becomes a game of strategy and you’ll need a lot of luck to change up the gaming field. As you match up tiles in a certain pattern of 3 identical tiles, the tiles will disappear and they’ll leave some room for other tiles. Once your pattern includes 6 identical tiles, you’ll unleash a lightning bolt that helps you clear out some of the remaining tiles.
This power is only one of the special features within this game. You’ll gain access to active and passive powers by collecting and obtaining certain items during your gameplay session. For example collecting dynamite allows the game to spawn different dynamite tiles. Once a dynamite tile is linked to 3 other identical tiles, the dynamite tile will clear up nearby tiles to help you out. Other objects, such as the eyeglasses, for example, give you a passive power which will show you nearby tiles you can clear. As you continue your story, your power bank will grow “bigger and smarter”.
All of these special modes seems a bit overwhelming since they’re new but Azkend 2 does a great job in simplifying the transition from one mode to another. The stages were built in a great way where the player still can enjoy the gameplay experience and learn new things. The gameplay feels quick and intuitive. Just one step at the time, just how I like it.
Unfortunately, sometimes the game lets you play a mini-game that feels a bit out of place, it’s good to have some variety but this game section feels unnecessary. After completing some puzzles, you’ll have this clue-finding game section where a lovely scenery is being presented and you’ll have to find small portions of this lovely image with the help of the view finder. Just click the place where the portion should be. If you click wrong, you’ll gain a time penalty for your next puzzle.
The game offers an ok story, different game modes and different abilities to help you out, but there’s still the feeling of repetitive gameplay, even though the game has a good generating system that makes each puzzle feel different. Each puzzle will be different than the last puzzle.
| The Good: | The Bad: |
| + simple but fun mechanics | – repetitive |
| + cool presentation | – tough challenges |
| + power ups is a nice addition | – “search for clues” doesn’t fit in |
Azkend 2 is fun to play and the story does attract the gamer with a good hunch of curiosity. It does seem that the story gets the job right, even though it’s a simplistic story to set the stage. The simple game mechanic of “matching tiles”, the different game modes, the power housing, the design … all these features give the game that little bit of extra, that makes it stand out from any other “match 3” type of puzzle game.
Score 3.5 out of 5:
