In this hectic world we live in, many times work and appointments must come before the fun and joys in our lives, including that of getting to play videogames whenever we want. Gone are the days when we could fire up a game of our choice and spend hours toiling away – now we seem to game in stolen moments here and there. With that in mind, perhaps it is no wonder that casual games have become such a popular gaming choice (especially with women who make up the vast majority of casual game players), as casual games allow us to either jump in and get those quick fixes of gaming bliss or either play them for as long as we want when we do have the time. In honor of the casual game, we'll be bringing you a new Casual Game of the Week every Monday to help you find that fix you might be needing in your life, and this week we have: Azkend

Imagine losing your memory, but knowing that you must traverse Asia in hopes of rediscovering that which you have lost, and hopefully finding the relic that is plaguing you and yet calling you forth at the same time. So goes the story of Azkend, detailing your search to find the device and maybe finally understanding it in the process. There isn’t much story overall, but occasionally every so many levels you’ll unlock a bit of memory and get a bit of story to move you forward; the real thing that will be moving you forward, beyond anything else, is the puzzle gameplay itself.

The gameplay of Azkend is your typical match three pictures in order to color the tiles underneath them until the whole board has changed colors, letting you move on and advance to the next level. The one thing semi-different about Azkend’s gameplay is that you can string together more than three of the hexagonal tiles at one time, letting you click once and drag across the whole board, allowing you to keep building up the match link until you run out of tiles of the same type that are touching or decide you want to stop the match for whatever purpose. Once you’ve colored every tile blue – sometimes taking multiple matches in later levels – a talisman piece will then fall onto the board, and you’ll need to match tiles underneath it to drop it down, letting you officially complete the level once the talisman has fully fell off the board.

Each talisman in the game is made up of five pieces with one piece tied to each level, making it so that once you complete five levels you’ll earn a new talisman that have special powers to help you out within the game. Once you get into a level you’ll then see talisman tiles on your board, and though you can make a match of three to remove them from the board and color the tile spaces underneath them, if you can make a match of four or more with the talisman tiles you’ll be able to unleash their powers. Talisman powers include blowing up a wide area around your match chain, letting shooting stars crash into the board randomly, hammers breaking random pieces, etc. You can switch the talismans out from one level to the next, so if you experience and find you don’t particularly like one power – or either you know another one might be more useful for a level coming up – you can always switch them out before entering into a level.

Much like other casual games in this same genre, the difficulty comes from the changing boards and conditions (though a constantly counting down clock is around to always be a threat). As you advance you’ll find tiles that need to be matched over more than once to officially make them change color; pictures that are frozen and can’t be used to make a match until a match touching them is made; tiles that are locked firmly in place and won’t unlock until a match is made that is touching it; and there are also tar tiles that will slowly spread if you leave them alone for too long, eventually completely ruining your board and costing you your game.

Graphically the game looks really nice, featuring bright pictures that enliven the boards, and the pictures you uncover by slowly regaining your memory are very lovely and are generally great pieces of art. Though the graphics are really quite good, the audio is only slightly above average, featuring clinking matches, exploding bombs, falling stars, and other such assorted noises.

The biggest problem with the game is that there just isn’t all that much that is new here, as many of the gameplay elements are the same ones you’ll find everywhere else when it comes to these match three tile games. Also, unlike other games of this sort that we’ve played, the game isn’t as hard as we’d like, as we were able to get about 30 levels in without even really breaking a sweat. If you’re looking for a slightly easier match three game with some really good production values though, however, Azkend just might be a game you’ll really enjoy.

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