Not often do I need to look up the origin of a word for a review. Games like Smash Bros Brawl, Phoenix Wright and Alone in the Dark are all games of which the ideas are simple to explain. Neves on the other hand was a little different with a type of game play which felt familiar, but not enough for me to tell what it was.
After a little thinking, a cup of tea and a swift chat with someone twice my age I soon learned the game I was trying to remember was something called Tangram, an old Chinese game dating back centuries. Now that I’ve explained that so your head doesn’t explode from sheer annoyance, let me explain the game in question. Neves is a puzzle game which uses 7 shapes that have been jumbled up to make a picture of a thing/object/Twix. These 7 pieces can be twisted, flipped and rotated to slot in any position the player chooses, it really has just taken the idea of Tangram and moved it to the modern age of gaming and during a period where ‘brain games’ on the DS seem to mean free money for companies.
Although the design of Tangram hasn’t changed in Neves, there have been some small additions to the game to try and mix it up. A total of 4 modes are available in the game; Silhouette, which is standard Tangram play, Time Pressure, where the player has 3 minutes to finish the puzzle, 7 Steps, where the player can only have 7 turns and Multiplayer (Single-card or Multi-card), where the player can face off against a friend to see who can finish the puzzle first. I highly doubt a large amount of time was spent thinking up these modes as they seem about normal for any puzzle game, but that doesn’t make them any less of an addition and challenge, especially 7 Steps. The touch screen is used really well to rotate, and change pieces; I don’t think it would be as good on any other platform thanks to the easy to use controls.
While some of the games later puzzles are definitely impressive, the graphics simply aren’t. Is that the fault of the developer? To a degree I suppose so yes, but this is based on game centuries old and if its following the design, there’s only so much that can be done with 7 shapes. The colours and fonts used in some of the menus look pretty ugly though and this can’t be blamed on anything else than bad developer judgement.
These bad colours and fonts are continued in the in-game and menu music, which some would call a bad move, but I call ghastly and annoying. It has a 70’s jazz bar feel to it but whoever is playing is deaf and holding the sax the wrong way. From what I can tell, the background music, which consists of about 3 songs which loop constantly, is all done in MIDI which doesn’t help at all as it sounds poor.
Closing Comments
While the game definitely has some bad features, the terribly annoying music can be turned down (or off altogether) and bad backgrounds and fonts are only suffered for a minimal time. What matters here is the actual game content and that’s pretty good. Boasting well into 400 puzzles, shallow multiplayer and a few extra modes, this game isn’t anything to get excited about but if you’re looking for an extra puzzle game to add to your collection, you could do plenty worse than this.
Score 6.0
+ Large amount of puzzles
+ Challenging
+ Good touch screen controls
- Gets repetitive
- Bad music and style
- More variety would have been good
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