
	Platform DS Genre Puzzle Publisher O3 Entertainment Developer oeFun ESRB E (Everyone) Released Q4 2006

- Unique game design - Fairly laid back pace

- Bare bones presentation - Slow pace eliminates some of the excitement

Review: Elite Beat Agents (DS) Review: Magnetica (DS) Review: Meteos (DS)
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Konductra

Score: 6.5 / 10

The DS has seen a refreshing number of puzzle games that defy the usual falling blocks convention. After Polarium and Meteos, now we have Konductra, another puzzler that makes good use of the touch screen.

Konductra starts with a simple empty grid. By drawing with the stylus, you lie down colored tiles, two at a time. Along the borders of the playing field are alternating white and black conduits. Your task is to link together conduits of the same color (black to black, white to white) by connecting them with like-colored

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tiles. Once you’ve created a connection, at any time you can trace the tiles and create a circuit, which will then cause the tiles to dissolve and award you points.

It’s easy to create a circuit by laying down three red tiles around the border and connecting them, but that will give you a mere pittance of a score. Your ultimate

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goal is to create huge blocks of single colored tiles together, with the greater points obtained by covering the middle of the playing field. Additionally, you can create combos by eliminating several different colored circuits at once, which encourages you to think heavily about tile placement It’s all a bit hard to grasp at first, but a fully voiced tutorial helps explain how it all works.

Compared to other puzzle games, Konductra is fairly low pressure. There’s a gentle time limit to put down tiles, but otherwise, you can generally take your time to map out your strategy. It leads to a less havoc filled and more thoughtful game, although one of that’s not nearly as exciting. Additionally, there’s not much of a thrill when you remove tiles from the board. Other puzzle games force you to think ahead by creating combos, but since there’s no gravity, matched tiles simply disappear instead of setting up more opportunities. There's no real sense of progression either - the game never speeds up, and when you've filed up the board, your impending doom seems to come at a snails pace.

The touch screen elements are a bit iffy too. If you accidentally let up on the stylus when you’re tracing a big combo, it either starts before you’re finished, potentially robbing you of points, or cancels out the whole thing, forcing you to start from scratch. Again, the time limit is pretty generous and resets in cases like these, so it’s rarely too frustrating, but it can be a pain when you’re running the stylus around the borders of the screen.

However, one of the biggest issues with Konductra isn’t necessarily with the game itself – since Lumines, puzzle game designers have been pressured into featuring fancy graphics and pulse pounding music. Konductra only has a single set of graphics, which looks and feels fairly low budget. And the grating electronic music quickly grows repetitive - there are a sparse number of songs, and they're assigned to specific modes, so you can't change them. There's not much in the way of extended playability either. In addition to a standard endless "play until you croak" mode, there's a task mode, again similar to Lumines, where you need to create requested patterns. There's also a versus mode, which adds a bit of intensity to the slow paced endless mode, since you're racing to create combos before the CPU can mess up your tile placement. Ultimately, however, it still isn't very exciting. There's a two player mode to give a bit more challenge, but it requires multiple cards, which is a bit strange for a title as low tech as this.

Konductra is a fun little puzzle game, but ultimately it comes down to a question of value. $30 for a barebones package that doesn't have nearly the addictive qualities or visual panache of other games in its genre is a bit steep. And the gameplay may be a bit too complicated for those who prefer their puzzlers more straightforward. However, at a cheaper price, puzzle games fans will be able to get quite a bit of fun out of Konductra.

- Kurt Kalata

(March 7, 2007)