Apple IPod App Reviews: Alchemize

Perhaps you’re familiar with the age-old dream of turning lead into gold or Alchemizing. Based on this premise, a mysterious new puzzle game has entered the App Store ranks. Alchemize by Schiau Studios aims to turn the Match-3 gaming experience into gold by way of impressive visuals, unique gameplay, musical depth, and an intriguing storyline. Let’s dig a little deeper into the game to see if it’s worth its weight in…well you know.

Although, the game is essentially a Match-3 puzzler (meaning you need to match at least three items in rows of columns to gain points), Schiau Studios has built in a few cool features to set it apart from the pack. The store takes you through the journey of man to make gold out of nothing. Your goal is to combine potions to create goal and other elements on your way to achieving immortality and wealth. Sounds mysterious doesn’t it? Regardless of the story line, the game is fun and absorbing as it takes you through different worlds to discover new elements.

Gameplay comes in the form of Classic, Action, and Avalanche. Classic presents a Match-3 board with a twist of Tetris. Elements appear at the top of the screen allowing you to rotate and reposition them before swiping them into place. Continue to match sets of three or more elements in order to eliminate them and keep your element-stacks away from the horizon line. Once a set of elements is matched and eliminated, they will leave behind an element of the next highest order. For example, eliminating a set of Red Tulip elements will unlock one Fallen Leaf element to replace the bottom left element of the previous combination. Next, constructing and eliminating a Fallen Leaf combination will unlock and leave a Snowflake element behind. This progression continues until you unlock the Gold element (25 elements up the chain). Reaching these successive power-ups can be quite a challenge and quite rewarding at the same time. Action game mode takes the Classic mode and adds to it a countdown timer — as if you don’t have enough stress trying to stay away from the horizon! Making matches keeps the timer at a safe level momentarily. If the timer reaches zero, the game ends. Avalanche mode is similar but when the timer reaches zero, an avalanche of elements are dropped onto the board.

Alchemize hosts a well honed user interface. The in-game audio accompaniment aligns well with the overall mystical feel of the game. High scores can be viewed and uploaded to the Alchemize leaderboards. And instructions can be referenced at any time by returning to the main menu.

After spending some time with Alchemize, we’re confident in saying that we’ve found puzzling “gold”. Taking the best qualities from titles like Bejeweled 2 and Tetris, Alchemize comes off as a unique un-matched (no pun intended) $0.99 puzzle game that we are happy to award with our 5-Dimple gold medal.

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