7 Wonders of the Ancient World is a throwback to a time past, where civilizations made of stone conquered all, where boys were boys and men were men, where gem swapping games were still f--wait. Did I say that?Unfortunately, it's all too true of this game though. I love a good Bejeweled-esque type game as much as the next person, but in my humble opinion, this game just doesn't quite make the grade. The whole premise seems to be a feeble attempt at being an educational game about the 7 wonders of the world. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. However. If you bought this game, the whole point was because you wanted to play puzzles. You'd probably like to unwind, and not really have to think about much of anything, as this is a fairly casual gamer type of a game. You don't want to read page upon page of boring history notes. If you did, you'd pick up a book. So there's a point against it in the first place. Secondly, I take issue with the main menu/opening screen of the game. There's a long menu down the right side of the screen with different play options. But for the actual regular game? Off to the left on a big glowing medallion. Now, given that menu, I didn't even hardly take notice of the medallion as anything other than decoration at first, so I kept clicking Rune Quest and Free Play, and driving myself nuts in that I couldn't figure out why, despite completing the level in the allotted amount of time and without losing lives, I couldn't progress past the first wonder. I very nearly almost wrote the game off at that. I felt really stupid when I realized that, not only was that medallion a button, it was the button to play the *actual* game. Another point docked down for confusion in layout.
This brings us to the actual gameplay itself. The very first thing I noted was how tiny - miniscule, even - each of the tiles on the board are. This makes precision very, VERY difficult; you often swap the wrong piece by mistake. (Another point down.) I feel that this game would actually work out better if it did NOT implement the use of the stylus, or, at the very least, gave an option to use the arrow keys instead. It might take a little longer to maneuver around with, but it would ensure precision, and any mistakes would be the fault of the user.
Also worth noting is that while you're playing the game down on the lower screen, the upper screen displays tiny little workers building the wonder with the blocks you're providing them by clearing them off the bottom screen. It's a nice touch. However, if you're ADD like I seem to be, you'll find yourself sitting there wanting to watch what the workers are doing while the time ticks away down the clock, and before you know it, the level's not done and your time's up. (However, I can't hold that against the game.)
Each wonder has approximately 8 levels to complete to finish it. Once you complete the wonders, there's a bonus 'wonder': Atlantis. It's not particularly hard though. Another thing I have against the game that I learned the hard way, on the second to last level of the game at that... Once you run out of spare lives? You don't have the opportunity to just do the whole wonder over again. No, it's GAME OVER, you start over from the VERY start. It's extremely frustrating.
On top of which, if you were to sit down and play the game beginning to end? It would only take you a few hours to do so, if that. (I had an insomniac night, started from the beginning of the game around 11 pm, and completed it by not quite 3 in the morning.) I guess it's just as well though, because despite the fact you're working on constructing different wonders, the game is essentially extremely repetitive and gets boring quickly. The colors of the tiles don't even change with the levels. Any sort of variety would have helped.
Ultimately, I think I'm going to rate this game a 6 out of 10 ancient construction workers. It's not the worst puzzle game I've ever played, but it's far from the best, either.
