Labyrinth Review

UFO Interactive has made quite a few games for the DS over the past couple years. Thus far, I have had a chance to play and review three of them, and each of them has had one thing in common: they were competent on some level but each had a fatal flaw. Sudoku Mania had a random puzzle generator that was too given to patterns. Devilish was way too short. Underground Pool had too few modes. So, needless to say, now that I have gotten to Labyrinth, I went in wondering what I was going to find here. Was Labyrinth going to be the UFO game to buck the trend? Read on to find out.

Graphically, Labyrinth looks pretty decent. Granted, these are by no means graphics that are going to show off the maximum capabilities of the DS, but they could have been far worse than they are. Everything moves well, and there is no slowdown of any kind to speak of even though the game can be very fast paced at times. Overall, there are no problems here.

On the sound front, things are quite good. The sound effects, granted, are a bit generic but they are not anything atrociously bad. The music, which changes between levels, is all quite upbeat and catchy, almost to the point of being addictive. Make no mistake about it. The music is a high point in this game. It is just too bad there is no way to choose which theme you want to play at will. That is a forgivable offense though, as it is not present in many other games.

In terms of gameplay, for a modern equivalent Super Monkey Ball would be the closest thing to compare to Labyrinth, but, for those of you familiar with Marble Madness, this game is actually closer to that. The concept of this game is simple. Your objective is to get your ball from the beginning of the maze to the end of it within the time limit. You do not do this by controlling the ball at all. Rather, the ball always falls down and you rotate the maze itself. I should note that, unlike Super Monkey Ball and Marble Madness, you cannot fall out of the maze.

Of course, it is not that simple. There are many different types of obstacles that you can run into that can slow you down or even make you lose time. When you reach the goal to a maze, you get a time bonus added to what time you have left and are sent to the next maze. Everything controls well, and you can never blame the control if something goes wrong. There are two different ways to rotate the maze using buttons and you can also choose between two different ways to do so using the touch screen, so there is a comfortable method of control for pretty much everybody.

In the single player mode, there are four different sets of courses graded by difficulty, including a training course. The difficulty increases as you move on through each set of courses, although it does seem that there is a sudden jump in difficulty between the advanced courses and the expert courses. All of the courses are laid out well. The only problem here is that none of them are particularly lengthy. If you knew what you were doing and did not have to do the same course over and over too much, you could easily breeze through every course in this game from all four skill levels in under half an hour.

That, of course, sort of destroys any semblance of game length with this game unless you want to go back and improve your times. The game keeps track of your record for each individual course and for each set of courses as a set. You can continue in the middle of a set of courses if you run out of time, but in order to set a record time for a set of courses, you have to get through them all without continuing. That might give some motivation for replaying the game a little to get through each set of courses without having to continue, but only if you are really into this type of game. Otherwise, you would probably just want to beat each course individually just to say you had.

On the multiplayer front, this game boasts multiplayer for up to four people with a single game card. In the multiplayer, everybody does the same course and whoever gets through it the fastest wins. This is not anything that is going to add a lot to the lasting value of this game, but it is a nice addition nonetheless, especially since they did not make it require multiple game cards.

What then is the conclusion? This game is quite fun while it lasts, but it is way too short. Sure, it may be a port/remake of an earlier game (which is my guess since Taito was involved in making this game in some way), but it is still a fun game. It just does not last long enough to be worth paying too much money for. If you can find it cheap, go for it, but I would not pay more than seven to eight bucks for it.