Years ago Dr. Emily Jones stumbled on an ancient artefact that gave her a treasure map to the fabled Aztec City of Montezuma. It’s 2007 andYears ago Dr. Emily Jones stumbled on an ancient artefact that gave her a treasure map to the fabled Aztec City of Montezuma. It’s 2007 and her granddaughter Cathie Jones is also an archaeologist continuing the work she’s inherited. When someone she loves dearly becomes ill Cathie takes on notes her grandmother Emily wrote which detail the location to the mythical Fountain of Youth. It’s a place where its water has amazing restorative properties. With a virus sweeping the world it’s up to you to help Cathie heal the world!
Following the success of Visual Shape’s The Treasures of Montezuma (2006) Alawar Entertainment’s own in-house development studio decided to take a crack at a semi-sequel/spin-off. Curse of Montezuma (2008) plays very much like the first game although there are some noticeable design differences. As mentioned in the plot synopsis you take on Dr. Emily Jones granddaughter Cathie who goes on her own journey meeting the locals like Jose who offer advice (mostly backstory) or help in her quest while the player is left to match a set of jewels before continuing to the next level. There are a couple of mini games between puzzles but nothing too taxing. Depending on how fast you are you can collect a specific medallion which can be used to buy power-ups to help you in the levels. This is where the first major change occurs and personally not for the better. The way the power-ups worked in the first game was that you would buy your upgrades and a specific power-up would be automatically activated when you matched jewels a certain way. It’s no longer the case as you’re now given full control of which power-up to access however this becomes a problem because you need to match enough to fill up your power-up meter in order to use something. The player needs to keep their eye on the gauge and the grid at the same time. Figuring out what power-ups you need to pick when makes the game harder than it needs to be. On one side it gives more freedom to the player yet the difficulty does rocket as a result of this change. The other big change is the match-3 puzzle grid which depending on the layout (in later levels especially) can have the jewels come from opposite ends of the board or enter in different patterns. It totally changes gameplay in a rather refreshing way as you now have to consider a different strategy for every new level. As a result matching jewels from top to bottom is no longer the only way to play. Some of the later levels do get hard and my hat off to you if you can get a gold medallion on the very last level because as far as I’m aware it’s impossible. In terms of presentation the game takes on a similar comic strip style to Natalie Brooks: Secrets of Treasure House (2008), also by Alawar Friday’s Games. The story itself with its boring exposition feels uninvolving, made worse by Cathie Jones being rude and completely unlikable. The game upon release was renamed for other distributors as Jungle Quest and I’m not sure why unless the digital distributors wanted to market it as a standalone game.
Curse of Montezuma falls into the trap of taking one step forward but one step back. The unpredictability of its grid system across various levels is refreshing. If one grid design bothers you the next will be different. However, the reworking of the power-up system is needlessly complicated and it doesn’t help that Cathie Jones is so unlikable she makes the other one note exposition characters more interesting. An epic premise with a boring plot and annoying lead…but the gameplay is nice.… Expand
