Ancient Egypt remains to this day a wondrous world of mystery, filled with mythical gods, mummies, great pyramids, and all other manner of sparkling wonders. Ancient Egypt also apparently had a lot of balls – red, purple, green, blue – balls of all colors. Ancient Egypt also produced a pretty good puzzle game with those balls called Luxor 2.

THE STORY SO FAR
It's a puzzle game! Did you really expect something to go here? Instead, why don't we just talk? How are you doing today? Good? What new fall television shows are you watching? Yep, Heroes is great. Okay, enough chatter, let's get to the good stuff now and why you clicked in here in the first place.

GAMEPLAY
In Luxor 2, you control a scarab that skitters about the bottom of you computer's screen, carrying on its back a glowing ball of a certain color. Meanwhile, you've got a line of balls of multiple colors traveling along a course, trying to get inside the pyramid you are sworn to protect. So how do you go about protecting your pyramid? Why by shooting your ball and making connections of course.

As the line of balls edges ever closer to getting to your pyramid, you must eliminate them from the screen so they can't move along their course, and you accomplish this by shooting the scarab ball up towards the top of the screen, trying to get it to connect with balls of the same color, so they make a connected chain of at least three. Once a chain of at least three is made, the balls will disappear, and the ones before it will either smoosh into the ones behind the combo or will wait for the ball train to catch up to it. After you make a combo and eliminate them from the board, however, there are opportunities to make additional combos, by having the pieces that merge together also form connected groups of at least three, thus eliminating themselves as well.

While you are making combos, you are getting several trinkets, such as ankhs to give you an extra life, treasure to add to your point total, or powerups that grant you things like Color Clouds (changes balls in an area to the color of that cloud), a Fire Ball (sets on fire balls close to where it hits), Daggers (destroy individual balls without having to connect them), Scorpions (swipe rows of balls off the screen), and other assorted powerups to help you survive a level.

Things start off simple enough, with only a few colors to manage, but gradually you start to get more, plus the ball chain starts speeding up as well, which means you'll have to start thinking quicker and firing faster. However, the thing that really starts messing with you, are the levels, as they are these snaking paths that like hiding behind the extra length of the ball chain, forcing you to wait until after they've moved out from behind it, as well as environmental objects like bridge covers that make you wait until they are out in the open.

The main draw of Luxor 2 is the Adventure Mode, which spans 88 different levels; you'll be spending a great deal of your time here, because to see all the 88 different levels, and to unlock them for play in the game's other modes, you will have first had to have played them in Adventure Mode. The other real mode of interest is Survival, in which you play on one of the levels of your choosing (that you've previously played on) and see how long you can survive on that level.

At first, I didn't get the appeal of the game, as it was simply shooting colored balls into other colored balls, but then I gradually got more and more into it, until I found myself in some rather intense battles, struggling and sweating to eliminate that chain of green balls before they made it into my pyramid. You really get attached and into the game rather quickly.

GRAPHICS
Though not genre pushing or groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, I really enjoyed the bright colors of the game, as the balls all popped nicely off the screen, but the real winner here are the environments, with there muted browns and shiny golds, which are relaxing in their beauty. The 2.5D type levels are also spectacular in how they are incorporated into the game, as the balls swoop around, slightly going into and out of the background, to show the rise and fall of the ball chain's path. Nicely done.

SOUND
Though not as great as the visuals, the sound does a nice job of representing exploding balls, and the Egyptian music playing in the background rounds out the Egyptian themed package nicely.

IN CONCLUSION
Though you wouldn't think it from initial appearances, popping balls is surprisingly engaging and fun. I don't exactly make time for it, where I'll say, "From lunch till one I'm going to play Luxor 2," but if I ever find myself with some downtime, looking to fill a few minutes up to an hour, I find myself time and time again now reaching for Luxor 2 to get me that quick fix of fun, casual gameplay.

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