Luxor Quest

There have already been two Luxor games, and both were good enough to earn Silver Awards in their retrospective reviews.

The Luxor games simply use a winning puzzle formula (and one you might have seen before in games like Zuma) which tests the quickness of your reactions, the accuracy of your aim and your ability to make the right decision fast.

The ways in which Luxor Quest improves on its predecessors are mostly visual. Its 30 levels, while still based around the Egyptian theme, are much more abstract than before. So there's a sort of sky at night themed level and one that takes place in the belly of a snake, among others.

They're also a lot better looking: Luxor Quest looks practically next generation compared to Luxor 2, and that looked great to start with.

Aesthetics aside though, Luxor's basic gameplay remains the same. Each level contains a pre-laid track which a sort of trolley filled with coloured spheres makes its way slowly (at least to start with) along.

You have control of a winged scarab that you can move left and right across the bottom of the screen and which gets loaded up with one coloured sphere after another. You simply need to line that up with a like-coloured sphere then fire it, so it sticks to the same colour.

Get three of the same colour in a row and they disappear. Your overall goal is to stop the runaway trolley of spheres before it builds enough momentum to steamroller it's way to the pyramid at the end of the track.

To help you on your quest are power ups, which are released for every second sequence you match up. These power ups cause all sorts of effects - from sending an explosion along the track that takes out a whole trolley of spheres, to one that makes the spheres move in reverse along the track.

Towards the second half of the game, mastering the use of these becomes key to managing to finish a level since they get pretty hard.

Levels also come in three different flavours - the Classic level (which is just the basic game I've just described), Survival, which puts you up against a super tight time limit, and Onslaught, in which Seth's statues pop up randomly to block your line towards the spheres and need to be hit out of the way.

Luxor has already proved itself a brilliant puzzler. What Luxor Quest brings to the series are more luscious graphics, a greater range of level types and more refined gameplay.

The difficulty level is much more consistent than it was in Luxor 2, gradually growing from a fairly pedestrian speed and level of toughness to later levels that belt along and really test you.

30 levels isn't that many, especially when the first ten will be a breeze for players of the previous games. Still, that can be forgiven when what is there is of such high quality. Even the music is top notch.