Top 1 Xbox 360 Site

An Xbox Live Arcade game (built for the Xbox 360 system.)

Explore the ancient ruins of Mayan civilization while discovering hidden treasures and priceless artifacts. In this unique new take on the classic-style matching game, you must rearrange valuable relics to turn sand tiles into gold. As you venture deeper into the jungle, you will encounter increasingly difficult puzzles containing secret twists, cursed items, and buried artifacts.

Genre: Action

Developer: iWin.com

Online Play:

Local Play:

April 26, 2006 –
Anyone familiar with Bejeweled 2 will immediately feel comfortable with Jewel Quest, since they’re almost the same game. Players advance through stages by moving around jewel icons to try and match three or more in a row or column. When they’re lined up, the icons blow up, giving you points and bringing more into the board. As more blocks fall, combos can be triggered if the icons happen to line up with three or more in a row. You switch jewels in pairs, and if a switch doesn’t result in a three or more match, it can’t be performed. Jewel Quest does differ from Bejeweled 2 in a few ways, however. First, the goal of each stage isn’t to net a certain amount of points in a time limit, but rather to turn all the squares to gold. Accomplishing this requires you to blow up a block in every square of each level’s grid, which turns out to be an enjoyable challenge.

Jewel Quest isn’t the deepest Xbox Live Arcade game out there. For 800 Microsoft Points you’ll get the offline single player game and leaderboards, and that’s pretty much it. There’s no special challenge mode, no online battle mode, nothing beyond the basic content. Spread out over five main levels each broken up into numerous sublevels, the single player content will take you a number of hours to flip your way through. Of course, buying XBLA games isn’t necessarily about beating them, it’s more about getting high scores. Despite the relative dearth of gameplay options, you’ll find the gameplay interesting enough to keep coming back for a while.

Rating Description

out of 10
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6.5
Presentation
Options are organized into an accessible, visually appealing package. The story isn’t worth much.

6.5
Graphics
For an XBLA game, it looks pretty good. Nice backgrounds, colorful icons, but nothing spectacular.

7.0
Sound
A few nice tunes complement meager sound effects.

7.0
Gameplay
It gets addictive. While it lasts.

3.0
Lasting Appeal
Chalk up a few hours for the story mode. A few more to bump yourself up the leaderboards. Beyond that, there’s not much here.

6.6
Passable
OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)

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