7 Wonders of the Ancient World

"A good low-budget puzzler with some fuzzy flaws"

7 Wonders of the Ancient World

Could you name all Seven Wonders of the World? I sure couldn't. But with this puzzle game incarnation you can assist in their construction. 7 Wonders of the Ancient World is a port of the (low-budget) PC game of the same name, it's a Hot Java Games and MumboJumbo production published by Funsta in 2007. Its gameplay is based on the classic Bejeweled. And if you couldn't get enough of the glorious Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, 7 Wonders offers more similar gem-switching game fodder... or almost.

The goal of the game is to construct, or re-build, famous ancient monuments. Each monument is divided into 8 stages, and each stage consists of one screen with one play field. These play fields start out as simple big squares, but will later assume more irregular shapes that will challenge you a bit more. They are made of individual blocks (small squares), and each block has a rune-engraved gem of one of different colors sitting on it. Now this is where you interact with the game. All you can do is exchange two adjacent runes in order to form rows of three up to five of the same runes. If no row is formed, the move is invalid. Once such a row is formed, it disappears and the runes above fall down to fill the holes. Now here's the actual clou of the game. Wherever a rune disappears, the underlying block breaks and produces some building material for the small digital workers helping to construct the monument. Once a block is broken, it still lets rune-gems sit on its place, but it will not yield any more material. In order to complete a stage of construction, you have to make runes disappear at least once on all blocks of the play field before the timer runs out. Additional to that, you have to let an indestructible corner stone or triangle stone fall from the top to the very bottom for the little workers. Luckily, there are a few extra runes that appear when you make rows of four, five, or other special arrangements. These explosive extras make a whole row, a row and a column or some randomly distributed gems disappear.

7 Wonders is easy to get into and has a good learning curve at the beginning, but only up to a certain point. From there on, difficulty stagnates more or less, but at least it does that at a fair level that still offers a good challenge e.g. with protected blocks or irregular play fields. Yet, as it's the case for many puzzle games, a lot always depends on luck - with the gems' colors and especially with the best explosive extra rune.

To all the rune-switching action you get a very decent soundtrack, with some different melodic beats for each monument. It works well as a non-obtrusive background music. Sound effects are nothing extraordinary, but do their job, too. Graphically, the game gives away its origin, as it's a more or less direct port of a low-budget PC game. While on one hand being functional and rather bright and colorful, the optical presentation is pretty rudimentary and not even near top Playstation 2 level. The graphics lack brilliance and contrast, also resolution seems to be rather low, which results in somewhat fuzzy screens. This is especially annoying on the actual puzzle screen - e.g. I had to sit closer to the screen to be able to quickly distinguish explosive extra runes from regular yellow or orange ones. Well, maybe some glasses would have done the job, too, but that was the faster solution, and I can't get myself to... oops, I'm getting carried away. At least controls are simple, commandos are easy to execute and the menus are easy to navigate.

Once you finish building all wonders of the story you can, of course, play that mode again, trying to beat your own ranking and highscore. Beside story mode, there are two alternative modes. There's Free Play, where nomen est omen, and there's Rune Mode, where the same stages as in Story Mode are played, but now with a different aim: you have to collect given amounts of specific runes, so e.g. 25 blue gems or 50 green gems. Unfortunately, there's no two-player mode of any form, and neither is there some kind of custom level option, which would have made a nice addition.

Still, as a low-budget title, 7 Wonders is an entertaining puzzle game. One can play for a couple of minutes at a time only, or it may grab you and make you play for hours without realizing how time passes. If you consider the game, you certainly shouldn't nearly pay full price, for this the overall content is too small and the 'craftsman quality' is not good enough. But if you like the genre and need new fodder, grab it when it's cheap. It's worth 10-15 bucks/euros easily.


Final score: 64/100 - which is rounded down for GameFAQs to 6/10.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/18/08

Game Release: 7 Wonders of the Ancient World (EU, 04/25/08)