Treasures of Montezuma Blitz Review

Treasures of Montezuma Blitz (ToMBlitz for short) is a free-to-play game on the PlayStation Vita that was released on March 21st 2012 on the PlayStation Store. ToMBlitz is a puzzle game that utilizes some of the hardware features of the Vita console, including the touch screen and rear touch pad.

GAMEPLAY: The aim of the game is to get three tokens of the same colour in a row, either horizontally or vertically (diagonally not allowed). You can chain up a number of tokens if you are fast enough and get more points. However, you only have a minute to get as many points as you can. The more sets of 3 you complete, the higher your multiplier and the better your score.

Initially, you get five ‘lives’ to play the game. If you want more lives there are two options. You can either wait approximately 30 minutes to recharge your lives or purchase five lives from the PlayStation Store.

As you match tokens and rack up the points, you also earn gems. Gems can be used to unlock power-ups to help you get higher scores and level up quicker. Levelling up can take a while, but at each level, you unlock gems and power-ups too. If you run out of gems, you can again purchase more from the PlayStation Store or continue to play the game to earn more.

To make the game competitive and social, ToMBlitz utilizes Near so you can share your high scores with friends and post it to your Near Activity feed. You can also compete against your friends and others around the world through the leaderboard and join in on weekly tournaments.

Loading up the game once a day also give you the ability to earn bonus gems through the daily scratch card. You can share anything you win with friends on Near too.

CONTROLS: As previously mentioned, the game makes use of the front touchscreen and back touch pad to control the game. The front touchscreen is used to switch tokens around. You can do this either by swiping over two tokens to swap them, or touch one token and then on any adjacent token to swap them. I found that the former approach was quicker, and the ability to multi-touch blocks made it easier to rack up the points.

The back touch pad is used to clear the smoke covering the tokens when the game enters the dark mode. The smoke makes it hard to see more than a few tokens so you must used the back touch pad to push the smoke aside to see the tokens underneath. If you play the game vertically, the tokens will appear from above, making use of the sixaxis feature on the console.

SOUND: The sound / music is what you would expect from a typical puzzle game. There are various sound effects when you connect a set of three tokens, and additional sound effects when one of the power-ups are used. Nothing special here, and to be honest, I didn’t notice the music much when playing the game.

VERDICT: Overall ToMBlitz is a fantastic little puzzle game for the Vita, and the fact that it’s free to play is a great bonus. It makes good use of the touch screen, and it is incredibly addictive once you get the hang of the game. However, you don’t want to be too engrossed by its addictive nature as you could spend a fair few pounds refilling your crystals and lives. For those who can control themselves it is a great game for a quick pick-up-and-play action.

There are no trophies to unlock in the game, which is somewhat disappointing as it could add additional value to the game.

OVERALL: 7 / 10

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