4 Elements

4 Elements originated as one of those casual PC games, the like of which Popcap (aka Popcrack) specialise in. Nice for passing the time at work, or at home when you’re supposed to be doing homework. It then migrated to the mobile platform, available for download on the iPhone. Now it has arrived on the DS, and really, very little has changed.

The game has a rather pointless fantasy story which involves the world basically falling apart and needing to be put back together using the magic of four elemental books. Naturally, you are the only one who can be trusted to unlock the four books and four powers; a wonderfully bearded wizard outsources the job to you.
The first item of business is to find the key to unlock the book through a ‘find-the-item’ puzzle. So far, so simple. You then have four pages to be deciphered in each book. Deciphering the pages is done so through the main puzzle game, a variation on the much-loved and much-used ‘match-3’ format.

We all know and love match-3 puzzles, but there are so many of them that a little variety is necessary. You have a grid of symbols, and a little pool of energy with a shrine as your end goal. Match 3 or more coloured symbols using the stylus and you will clear a path for this energy to flow through, until it reaches the shrine and you get one step closer to deciphering the page. Things get more complicated as you go along, with stone blocks that require explosions to clear them, ice blocks that need to be matched multiple times and cool arrows that when triggered, remove otherwise impassable rocks. Luckily, there are powerups you can use to get you through the tough bits. It’s a pretty cool way of passing the time, and does get quite addictive. The grid is also quite large, so you’ll have to scroll around it. However, you’re only allowed to scroll a certain distance away from the energy that you’ve already channelled, which is a pain when you’re trying to see the bigger picture and work out where you need to go next.

Each page of the magic book needs four of these matching puzzles to be completed. But it’s not over; after that you have to finish a rather weak spot-the-difference puzzle to do something… I’ve lost track at this point of what I’m doing with these magic books. All I really care about is the main match-3 puzzle and the other puzzles are just filler. They are the boring bread that sandwiches an otherwise tasty puzzle game. There are also lot of these puzzles to play through, although with no scoring/rating system that you’ll want to pay attention to, you won’t be replaying them to better your ranking. With four puzzles to complete each page, four pages in each book and four books in total, there are 64 match puzzles to play. This is a good thing. The four rubbish ‘find-the-item’ games and 16 ‘spot-the-difference’ games aren’t.

There’s not much to 4 Elements, but there doesn’t need to be. As a version of a rather popular puzzle game, it’s functional but the PC and iPhone versions look a lot more colourful and less… well, like a cheap DS game. The music is also pretty terrible, but it can be switched off. While the fantasy element of the game is a nice touch, it is a little unnecessary. To be honest, if they just presented the game as a pure match-3 puzzler, it would have been a lot better. As it is, the fantasy storyline is something you just skip through and the other puzzles are just annoying.