Review written by Ben Stanley
Chillingo - The Premier Games Publisher
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The great myths of the ancient world were timeless expressions of the human experience, which explains why they are retold in one form or another by each succeeding generation and survive even to this day. So great is their influence that they sometimes even manage to work their way into Pocket PC Games!
The Dung Beetle, also known as the Scarab Beetle, is so named because of its ingenious use of dung in the procreation process. When it's ready to start a family, the Dung Beetle goes out and finds some good old fashioned dung, rolls it into a ball, lays eggs in it, and then rolls it around in the dirt, creating a snug little incubator for the baby beetles. The Ancient Egyptians believed that the Sun moved across the sky in a similar manner. Specifically, they believed that the Sun was rolled across the sky by a Scarab Beetle god, whom they called Khepri. After a brief slumber of a few millenia, Khepri has been reborn through PD3A's new Pocket PC game Scarabeus! You are Khepri noble Pocket Gamer, roller of dung!
[How you Play:]
When you start a new level in Scarabeus, you'll see a reservoir that contains a bunch of different colored marbles--I'm not going to call them balls of dung--from which one marble at a time is dispensed. The marble will fall into the first available marble holder space it comes across. Thus, if there is already a marble occupying a particular space, the marble will roll past that space until it finds an open space. The marble holders can be rotated by tapping on them with the stylus. To send a marble rolling down a chute, just tap on it as well. Above the marble resevoir is displayed your score, marbles remaining to be dispensed, and your remaining lives (you start each game with three).
You are Khepri noble Pocket Gamer, roller of dung!
The player's task is to fill each marble holder with four marbles that are all the same color, at which point the marbles disappear and are replaced by a golden Scarab Beetle which hatches in the middle of the marble holder. To complete a level, all marble holders must have Scarab Beetles in them. You receive additional points if the color of the marbles in a particular holder matches the color of the marble holder.
The chutes down which you send the marbles rolling can have several interesting modifications which will sometimes help you and sometimes hurt. These include holes in the chutes that open and close at irregular intervals, marble teleporters, machines that paint your marble a particular color, chutes that will only allow marbles of certain colors to pass, and more. Jewels of various types will also appear from time to time, which you can collect by hitting them with a marble.
You lose the game when you run out of lives, which happens when you don't have enough marbles to fill all the marble holders with balls of the same color. This can happen in several ways. You can lose marbles through holes in the chutes, by accidentally sending them to marble destroyers, by misusing "joker marbles" (a wild card sort of marble that can be any color), etc.
There are 65 levels, some more challenging than others and it seemed to me that the difficulty of any particular level didn't always seem to correspond with what level it was in the sequence. In other words, the level you just beat might turn out to be harder than the one that follows it.
When you begin a game you can choose between two modes of gameplay: "stepping stones" and "free game." I wasn't able to tell the difference between the two and an e-mail inquiry to the developer has not been returned as of this writing.
[A Quick Note about the Demo Version's Limitations:]
You might be reading this review because you want to know more about Scarabeus than the extremely limited demo version of the game allows you to pick up on. You see, the demo version only allows you to play the game 5 times before it becomes inoperable and asks you to purchase it. What's more, each time you view the main menu counts as one of your five alloted games! I downloaded the demo version the first or second day it became available and it is my sincere hope that the developers have since made the demo a little less restrictive. If they have, then disregard this part of the review; if they have not, then I strongly encourage them to do so.
[Graphics:]
The developers of scarabeus claim that the game has more than 1,500 animsprites. I'll admit that I'm not really sure what that means and when I first played the game I didn't exclaim to myself "wow, there must be something like 1,500 animsprites in this game!" But as the screenshots should make clear, the graphics in Scarabeus are truly excellent. In addition to the overall quality of the graphics, the developers added background images of Ancient Egyptians doing various things with the marbles, a nice touch that unexplainably adds a lot to the game's immersiveness.
My only complaint is a small one that won't affect most people: being partially color blind (or as I like to say, "color skewed") I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish between the green marbles and the gray ones.
[Sound & Music:]
The sound effects in Scarabeus are also quite good. When you rotate a marble holder, for example, it actually sounds like you're trying to move some old clay device that hasn't been touched by human hands for centuries...very Indiana Jones like. Having said that, though, there is one sound effect that the game could do without: every time you hatch a golden Scarab Beetle (by placing four marbles of the same color in a marble holder) a mystical female voice whispers "Scarabeus." Perhaps, its just a matter of preference, but I really think the game would be better without her input.
The music is the least appealing part of Scarabeus. Don't get me wrong, it's well done and sounds very professional but can be annoying at times nonetheless. It's difficult to describe what makes it so bothersome. It's partially the fact that it seems out of place in this particular game: the tunes often sound very Pink Floyd-ish, and while there's nothing wrong with Pink Floyd, it just doesn't seem like a good match for a game set in Ancient Egypt. While it is by no means fatal to the game, this mismatch does detract somewhat from the otherwise immersive game environment. As a separate matter, the music sometimes has at least a hint of that TV commercial ability to get into your head and stay there against your will.
[Gameplay:]
Scarabeus is extremely fun to play and provides an experience that is unique among Pocket PC games as far as I know. As others have noted, the combination of action and puzzle elements works particularly well. One also comes away with the feeling that the game might have been botched in the hands of less capable developers. For example, since the player's interaction with the game consists mostly of tapping marbles and the marble holders that are obviously in very close proximity to the marbles, there is the potential for substantial control problems. Thankfully, Scarabeus contains no such issues. In fact, the game experience as a whole is smooth and nearly flawless. Furthermore, as briefly discussed above, the developer has done a knockout of job of making the game environment an immersive one.
Scarabeus is extremely fun to play and provides an experience that is unique among Pocket PC games as far as I know. Put differently, Scarabeus is episodically addictive
The replay value of the game is considerably high. For one thing, there is no way that you're going to memorize the layout of each level. For another, the color order of the marbles changes with each game.
Scarabeus isn't the sort of game that you feel tempted to play from start to finish the very first time you pick it up (like Arvale is, for example). Instead, I found myself really wanting to play a few levels, putting it down for a while, and then repeating the cycle. Put differently, Scarabeus is episodically addictive.
Score-by-score breakdown
Gameplay: 90%
Graphics: 70%
Sound: 100%
Overall: 90%
Please note that the overall score is more than simply an average of the individual ratings. Many thanks to PD3A for providing our review copy.
You may wish to search for more reviews of games from PD3A. Alternatively, you can view all the reviews written by Ben Stanley.
