Mahjong Quest Expeditions (Nintendo DS) Review

Everything is pretty standard from the off. In the single player mode, you get your stacks of tiles and you have to remove them all two at a time. You can only move tiles if both are exposed and only then if they have a matching pair. It sounds vaguely complicated and fiddly, and to begin with it is. Once you get into it though you'll be knocking tiles off the board with remarkable speed. Just like it did to us, this game will start to eat away at you for 'just five more minutes'.

Whilst the menu system might be more complicated than a Rubik's Cube, once you get into the game it is really well put together. The twist this game offers to the tried and tested format is 'powered tiles'. Some tiles will explode other tiles, some are made of ice and some float away on balloons. It adds a nice extra dimension to the standard puzzle, but if you don't like all this new-fangled trickery you can simply play the classic mode.

What we don't like about this game is the menu. Yes it is a ludicrously cheap budget title, but this game feels needlessly cheap at times. Instead of words, all the menu buttons contain symbols. We have no idea what these symbols mean and so navigating through the menus is a bit of a lucky dip. It doesn't make any sense and is all terribly badly done. It really is a huge shame, as the puzzling is great and the sound and the visuals are pretty tight as well. The only other major problem with this game is seeing the symbols on the tiles. You'll need to have pretty sharp eyes to see some of the symbols on the tiny little tiles on the tiny little DS screen. Alas, this is an issue that plagues a lot of Mahjong titles, so we'll let the developers off a bit on that one.