Dsiware Review; Wizard Defenders

Random Disclaimer: Wizard Defenders curiously features exactly 0 wizards. Instead it is a game involving a bunch of witches. 

"Wizard" Defenders, like many Teyon games, is played by holding your Dsi like a book. On the touch screen, various colour witches line up and on the other Monsters appear on a grid and go towards you. To attack, you line up 3 or more witches of the same colour, either vertically or horizontally. The more witches, the more power at your disposal. If the Monsters reach your touch screen, then a column of spikes appears and pushes your magical armada back. If your army reaches the back of the touchscreen, you die.

While an interesting and unique concept, it remains at that, with absolutely no story and no way to play tactically, instead forcing you to scramble your witches in time so you don't die. The game as a whole is
altogether far too frantic and it is easy to be overwhelmed, having to swap between "arrow" and "wave" type attacks, even early on, can lead to your death. Chains are more likely to happen randomly and it is hard to do things as the game wants you to do

The low-down

A unique concept that is fatally flawed

5/10- Not worth the money

Dsiware Review; Robot Rescue

At its heart, Robot Rescue is a cheap and cheerful DSiWare game that looks to steal your attention and make your brain ache with its catchy, old-school music, cute visual touches and interesting flourishes. As with all the best puzzle games, it offers a simple control scheme, with gameplay that is easy to learn, but difficult to master.

Using the D-pad you control robots who must escape from a computer, all at the same time. As the levels get steadily harder, you must think multiple moves ahead, with new gameplay ideas being introduced the entire time; glue, traps, conveyor belts, to name a few. There are 40 levels to beat, which should keep you going for a while, and for the price range it is at, it is a very commendable game.


However, it feels like the gameplay has not been fully explored, as so many other ideas may have been used. The touchscreen is dubiously used to control aspects of the menu, while the A button is used for others. However, these are only little niggles and the game as a whole is great!

The low-down

Overall, this is a nice little game that could be a lot more. I lot forward to reviewing Robot Rescue 2

7/10- Good small game

3ds Eshop review; Groove Heaven

My short stay as a human metronome

Groove heaven is simpler than simple. There are two buttons on the touch screen, Move and Turn. These need to be tapped in time to the music to complete a simple platform game.

The story is that a Devil Lord has fallen in love with an angel from the "wicked land of Heaven". He charges a devil girl, Rhymi, whom you are in charge of, to take to the angel a single Rose, the eternal symbol of Love. Along the way you will encounter Cats, Dogs and Frogs, which all bar your way.

The meat of the game is going up the Tower of Heaven in Arcade Mode. There are 30 levels in this mode with 3 Roses to collect in each. While the Roses do add to the re-playability of the game, they do not alter the ending or give you any other perks. There are also musical notes to be collected within the stages, collect 6 of these and you get an extra life.

The graphics in Groove Heaven are beautiful, but with 3 different environments encountered throughout the Tower. It has a very unique visual style that suits the equally cool music. If you tap out of time, then Rhymi will "stumble" and stop for a moment, which has very little effect unless you are at a critical moment.

The level layouts are incredibly linear and you will have no trouble knowing where to go, which brings me onto my next point. Groove Heaven is incredibly easy and therefore, short. Even collecting all the Roses and replaying Arcade Mode to death, you shouldnt be spending more than 3 hours on this mode. While I have mentioned that it is easy, there can be random difficulty spikes which are frustrating, but if you have enough lives (which you will) it is quite easy to get past them.

There is one other mode, Timed Mode, which has a good stab at extending longetivity, but is just a reskinned version of Arcade Mode, which you play in one go through. Considering this is a £5 title, there is not as much on offer as would be expected. That said, while it lasts, it is and incredibly enjoyable yet simple adventure.

The low-down

Overall, this is a nice game which is a lovely time waster, but it is critically short

7/10- Lovely game with not enough content on offer

3dsWare Review; Heavy Fire Special Operations 3d

Hard as nails

At the beginning of this game, you are given a choice of 3 different save files. After selecting one, 3 different classes with slightly differing characteristics appear; Recon, Gunner and Support. After taking a shameless selfie, which is then transferred underneath a tacked-on army helmet, your profile is complete. Apart from buying guns, this is just about as far as customization goes.

You are a generic American soldier sent off to kill some generic Middle Eastern "insurgents" in generic middle eastern enviroments. However, unlike its WiiWare predecessor, you can now lose health and can die (very easily).

Within this, there are only 6 levels, but each one is a significant step up from the next. Grinding on previous levels is a must, simply so you can earn enough in-game cash to get a better weapon. You can also buy reload and ammo size upgrades which become necessary later on. One touch I really fell in love with was the exploding cars, barrels and destructible scenery. While only a small proportion of the maps is like this, it is a lovely touch.

The graphics are quite impressive for and Eshop title but can seem a bit muted due to the colours in which the game is set out in. The music is very standard, but does its job. The controls are very nice, with the touchscreen for aiming and L or R for shooting. This can give you a bit of cramp during extended play sessions, so if you have your Kid Icarus stand, then I suggest you use it.

Enemies which will harm you have an exclamation mark over their heads, and although this is a nice touch, there are some gimmicky kills, where an enemy runs out in front of you while you are on your last life.

The low-down

Overall, this is a satisfying buy with incredible potential. However, it falls short in story aspects and makes you want to cry in frustration with some of the times you are killed! Online leaderboards would be nice, seeing as this is a highscore game at heart. This reminds me a lot of the Arcades of my youth, so it is a huge let down to see that this has no story cutscenes or twists, and only a few lines text description before each level. Maybe if there was an option to play this out with checkpoints, it would help people like me, who found the difficulty spikes at time very frustrating.

8/10- Good in all aspects but falls short in length

DsiWare Review; Ball Fighter

Good Fast-Paced Puzzler Goodness

In Ball Fighter, you must call coloured "balls" into your mystical-wizardous hand to match them with other balls of the same colour. You must match up a certain number of these balls before moving on to the next level. All the time, the balls are moving closer. If you let them touch the bottom of the screen then you die.

You can mess around with the settings a bit and either hold it normally or like a book. It is nice having it over two screens but can take a bit of getting used to. There is a steep learning curve for about the first 5 times you play, due to there being no tutorial, but this is quickly fixed.

This concept is simple, but is implemented with such finesse that it is impossible not to get addicted. This is just in arcade mode! Arcade mode is, of course, the meat of the game, with four handy pick ups that can be fired using the trigger buttons.

There is also the aptly named "Brain Breaker" mode, in which you control two screens with the same set-up. This is incredibly hard to do without dying and once you finally get your head around it, and you move back to Arcade, or the self-explanatory Survival, your brain will be in a complete mess, while trying to revert back to the original control scheme.

The third mode, is a Two player Vs mode on a single Dsi. This is the kind of mode which many developers are simply too lazy to implement, so this addition is very welcome. This helps extend the length and replay value of this title.

The final mode gets the least attention from me but is still a nice touch, seeing if you can beat the computer in Player vs Computer.

The low-down

This is an addictive and frantic puzzler which is a great port. I got very distracted while writing the review by this game! I have spent many hours on this game and intend to spend many more. The only fallback is that it can get repetitive

7.5/10- A lovely puzzler

Dsiware Review; Clash of Elementalists

Elementally Simple

Clash of Elementalists is a 3rd person arena brawler featuring four anime girls with massive weapons and magic, intent on smashing each other to bits. Think Soul Calibur, with a bit less weapons and a bit more magic. Despite not being able to find a prologue anywhere, I managed to dig out an introduction from inside the "Help" bar on the menu;

"'Elementalists are battling all around the world..."

"Every Elementalist has a look-alike out there..."

With rumours such as these ringing in their ears, many young adepts of Elementalism

--some to protect the peace, others to satiate curiosity, but each for their own reasons--

flew to the battlefield.'

This is as far as the storyline goes, but do not fret, for this is not needed or even necessary within the actual game. When booting up the game, you are faced with a simple menu and looping unnecessarily loud music that gets annoying after not too long. The four game modes on offer are; Arcade Mode, Free Battle Mode, Versus Mode and Training Mode.

There are four characters on offer each with their own element; Celcius, Farenheit, Biot and Mole. These follow their respective elements of fire, water, earth and air and have cosmetically suited environments in which you battle them.

Arcade mode is the real meat of the game and this only lasts about 15 minutes, as you defeat the four characters. You can choose what round to start on, how long each bout lasts and AI difficulty.

The controls use L and R to shoot the Wide attack and the Normal attack respectively, while pressing both launches a power attack.

Free battle and Training have obvious enough motives with a few differing customization options setting them apart, while Versus gives you the option to play locally against a friend  who also owns the game.

The action takes place on the bottom screen and the game itself has beautiful player graphics but a questionably empty arena. However, when actually playing, you welcome this choice. The frame rate is also great and overall, visuals are completely on-par.

 The inherent problem is the camera, which seems to not be able to focus on the enemy character for long and which can only be rectified by incessant jumping, but even this is not perfect, for the simple reason that this also launches you into the air. There is also a method involving turning using A, but this is flawed to the core and even worse than jumping.

The control scheme is the same for Melee attacks, as when you are (a rare case) in proximity to your opponent these significantly more powerful attacks kick in. This control scheme can be slowly learnt, but it can never be quite mastered to a satisfactory level unfortunately

The low-down

This is a lovely looking and playing game with a slight lack of content and unlockables and an awful camera. This is a lovely way to kill some time on the bus. Not as much as I would've like for nearly £5.

Activity Log at time of review: 2 1/2 hours total played. 15 total plays with an average playtime of 10 minutes.

6.5/10- A good game, but with a bad camera

News and Reviews of Dsiware and 3ds Eshop Games from Teyon

First of all, I would like to tell everyone that I am not affiliated in any way with Teyon and that all Rights to their publications, logos and software are not owned by me. I shall distribute images and media for information purposes exclusively.

Now I am sure you are asking yourself a few questions right now, I will attempt to answer them in as much detail as possible.

Who are Teyon?

Teyon is a Polish video games developer, producer and online publisher for most of the leading platforms in the industry. I will be focusing on their games on the Nintendo 3ds and the Nintendo DS.

What is the purpose of this blog?
To keep everyone up to date with all Nintendo 3ds and DSi news and also to provide fair and concise reviews.

Why are you reviewing them exclusively?

For the simple reason that time is money, and I do not have much of either! Also, Teyon seem to get unnecessary negativity and flak for flaws which many other games also carry. I have realized that their games all hold huge potential!

Who are you?

I am an independent Nintendo Games Enthusiast who has too much spare time on his hands!

Are you related to Teyon in any way, shape or form?

This one is easy. No.

Where can I contact you?

Please direct all queries to gregory.hartleygh@gmail.com