Now now, I realize that this isn’t in my normal vein of reviews but you shouldn’t curse at me like that. Be nice. Mahjong may not star Mario, but it is still loved by many, and can be a fun diversion. This game takes the classic Mahjong tiles, mixes in some 3D and manages to come up with some fun, just look at it!
Not convinced? Fine. Simply put though, if you don’t like matching tiles in 2 dimensions, there isn’t anything here that’s really going to blow you away and make you fall in love with the game. However if you do like Mahjong tiles and you like your 3DS, I think I’ve found the game for you.
I had initial reservations of playing this type of game in 3D, I was worried about the camera and selection control being unwieldy, as the touch screen is in 2D. You don’t use it to select the tiles, rather you use the analog slide pad to move your cursor around, while you rotate and zoom the camera in with the shoulder buttons and d-pad. It doesn’t sound like it would work, but it does. In the 2D and the 3D modes tile selection feels pretty good, and I kept expecting to make the wrong selection in 3D, but it would pop to a tile that I meant it to, which kept frustration thankfully at bay. You play games like this to relax, not to stress out.
Which is where one of my concerns with the game comes in. It’s timed. As soon as you beat each stage you can remove the time limit, but initially they are all timed, which in my mind isn’t what I want. I want to take my time and not have to be glancing at a clock to match some tiles. If you want to put a clock in that counts up so I can have leaderboards or something of that nature (there isn’t) than that would be fine by me, but I would like to be able to disable that for all maps all the time. Maybe there’s an option to do it, but I couldn’t find it.
In terms of difficulty, there’s a nice progression in the alpha-beta-gamma. You can just call them easy-medium-hard, each with 20 stages initially. You unlock them as you play, and there are a whole bunch. Things can get pretty hairy when you get to gamma, and keep you on your toes by introducing more of a challenge to this otherwise very easy and relaxing activity. The 3D is nicely done, and I would play the 3D stages on 80-100% slider level. It’s nothing amazing, but the graphics do the job. However for some reason on the 2D levels I just couldn’t get used to the fact that things like the current tile and the countdown timer are on-top of the tiles. It’s the same way in the 3D puzzles, but I just found it very distracting and obnoxious in 2D, so I ended up playing at around 20% slider or not at all. Which is to say nothing of the music and audio. I wouldn’t expect much in a title like this, and they’ve delivered.
Put simply, if you like Mahjong tiles and have a 3DS, buy the game. If you can’t answer yes to both of those questions, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere.
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