Magnetica: Final Play — Puzzle, Challenge, and Beyond

Recent circumstances have placed me in the position of playing virtual carbon copies of the same game across three platforms unlikely to share such a title. I’ve been toying around a bit with both the Xbox Live Arcade and the PC version of Popcap’s Zuma while simultaneously progressing through Nintendo’s Magnetica. As you might expect, the controls are best with a mouse and keyboard on the PC, while the graphics are the best on the Xbox 360. However, the DS Magnetica title comes very close to the precision of mouse control, while dominating the other two titles in the replayability and diversity department.

I’ve never been one to focus on a single aspect of an amazing puzzle title, and Magnetica has given me plenty of opportunity to branch out into different play styles. I’ve spent most of my recent play sessions tunneling through the mind-bending puzzle gametype, and it’s different enough to feel like a completely unique game within a game. Puzzle mode presented me with a series of static predetermined marbles and gaps along with three to five marbles to throw out into the mix. To defeat a puzzle map, I had to annihilate all the marbles, including the ones I threw out onto the map. So, if I came up with a unique way to solve a puzzle, without using every single one of my extra marbles, the game would still be lost. This got to be annoying at times, especially on one level I remember, where I kept coming up with one stubborn blue marble left over.

No two puzzle stages were alike, and many of the levels presented me with a marble dilemma so difficult that it actually took several days to ponder out the solution. This wasn’t a problem though, because whenever I was stuck on a particular level, Magnetica allowed me to simply skip over it, returning later when inspiration struck. How can a game with a concept as simple as “three identical colors explode” provide so many unique puzzles you ask? The answer is the Magnetica puzzle trinity of empty space, silver marbles, and rainbow marbles.

Each puzzle map had a series of gaps in its respective marble streams, requiring careful administration of the magnetic affect of like colored marbles. Also, silver marbles occasionally appeared, which did not attract each other, nor did they explode when touched by two other silver marbles. In fact, the only way to destroy a silver marble was for me to strategically place it next to other marble detonations. As if this weren’t enough layers of strategy, rainbow marbles functioned by destroying all marbles of one color on a particular map, along with any marbles adjacent to them. The combination of these three different effects with the necessity of thinking four or five or even nine detonations ahead had my brow furrowing into Grand Canyon sized creases on several occasions.

The final gametype available in Magnetica is the challenge mode, which functions most like the classic puzzle game idea of endless increasingly challenging gameplay. Magnetica throws a couple interesting twists into the mix though, by starting out the challenge mode with only two colors of marbles, and slowly adding in the other colors as the game progresses. I had endless fun with this, because having only two colors allows even dense puzzlers like me to rack up combos nine or more detonations long. Magnetica’s challenge mode also offered me a very welcome rainbow marble almost every time certain destruction neared, giving me one last chance to pull myself out of a sticky situation. Challenge mode was the most visceral and fast paced mode for my tastes, and I’m certain I’ll be coming back to it frequently when one of life’s boring moments strikes.

Overall I continue to enjoy Magnetica over time, and I’d easily place it in the same league with the other DS mega-puzzlers such as Meteos and Tetris DS.

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