NEVES – NDS – Review

The DS has hosted a lot of great
puzzle games with the innovative touchscreen, and NEVES (seven spelled
backwards) is another one for the books.

NEVES is a popular board game in
Japan and, because of the touch screen, has a great touch that feels like you’re
sliding and turning real pieces.  The object of NEVES is to fit seven different
geometric shapes into the silhouette shape on the board. What sounds naively
simple can be painstakingly difficult. Within the first few puzzles I was
already struggling to make what looked like a rabbit.

The touch controls are very
intuitive and work very well, requiring only three simple maneuvers: to move, tap
the piece with the stylus and drag it into the slot; to turn the piece, you tap
little bubbles that appear on the corner and drag; and to flip, you double tap
the piece. The controls feel great and really make this game fun to play.

There are four different modes to
choose from in the game, featuring Silhouettes?, 7 Steps, Time Pressure, and
Versus. Silhousettes? Is just the standard, time-free mode, perfect for
training. Time Pressure is really the meat of the game, if you can call it
that, and gives three minutes for completion of a puzzle. 7 Steps is excruciatingly
hard from the get-go, only giving you 7 moves for the 7 pieces – no room for any
mistakes.  The Versus mode grants a lot of replay value, since it only requires
a single card to play with a friend.

Gameplay: 8.0
The touch controls work great and really make this game worth playing.

Graphics: 5.0
The presentation is extremely simple and at times very bland.

Sound: 4.0
The music is absolutely horrible. Cheesy, MIDI jazz recordings play all the
time and just don’t complement the methodical simplicity of the game itself. The game would have been better with minimal music or some exotic tune of some
kind.

Difficulty: Hard
The game is extremely simple, but gets oh-so hard very quickly.

Concept: 7.5
The mechanics of this game and the touch screen work together perfectly.

Multiplayer: 7.0
The multiplayer gives this game legs, but where is the Wi-Fi!!!

Overall: 7.0
Planet Puzzle League set the bar extremely high for puzzle games, especially
with the use of Wi-Fi; and while NEVES doesn’t come close to the slick
presentation of PPL, it has a very solid gameplay mechanic that will be
attractive to fans of the game.