Upon writing this review, I pondered how to weave it into gear; after all it's a game aboutblack and white squares. Polarium or Chokkan Hitofude (One Line Puzzle) as it'sknown as in Japan, is "the next Tetris" according to Nintendo. That is a huge pair of shoesto fill. As we all know Tetris is a gaming masterpiece. Something so simple yet soastounding. It sold millions of units over many platforms. But can Polarium reallybe that good of a puzzle game? Or are Nintendo just trying to come up with a greatearly puzzle title for the handheld wonder that is the DS?

When you first boot the game you are asked if you would like to go on a tutorial. Ifyou select no... Then obviously you're insane. There is a lot more than meets theeye to this game, more on that later. The tutorial consists of 7 parts whichbasically shows you how to use the touch screen controls. It goes over how tocomplete the puzzles. You do this by getting the same colour blocks (either black or white)on one horizontal line. You can do this by flipping the black squares to white orflipping the white squares to black. Pretty simplistic concept, shame the Gameplayis really hard, blows that 'simple' right out the window!

After you finish the tutorial you can move onto the games core, the puzzle mode.Puzzle mode consists of two parts. Firstly puzzle mode has pre set puzzles for youto play. There are 100 of them. They start off very easy but around the 20 markthings start to get pretty hard (for me away, I'm generally not a logical person!).You can spend literally 20 to 30 minutes trying to work out a puzzle. You can'tadvance to the next level of puzzles until you have completed the current 10 youunlock or start with. I'm stuck on 43 personally. The second part to puzzle mode is the clever custom puzzles. You can do two things here. If you or another personcreates a custom puzzle they will get a code, this code is unique and will only evergive your puzzle back if someone was to input this code onto their game. If you geta code from a website (Nintendo of Europe give you some if you register the gamewith them) you get a custom puzzle. You can store up to 20 of these custom puzzles.I think they are a great feature, I wonder if someone could come up with a seriouslydifficult one that no one could find the answer to?

The next mode is challenge mode. Challenge mode is basically a new take of theoriginal Tetris formula. Blocks of white and black squares drop from the top screen andyou must quickly change them to all the same colour using the same method as inpuzzle mode. Challenge mode again has two modes. Tutorial mode, which is simply avery slow version of the full mode just to get you into it. Challenge mode startsoff slow with just some simple lines to get rid of, but it gets very hard, veryfast. I can't even get past 75 lines!

I can't see many problems with Polarium; its simple formula is pretty perfect. Itdoes exactly what it sets out to do. Fun puzzle gaming, that's what it's all about.But seriously, did it have to be so hard? I really doubt I will ever finish thisgame, as extremely addictive as it is. I suppose one day I might finish it if I sit in a secluded room for the next year without sleeping. When thenext DS comes out probably.

So, graphics. What can you say about it? It's simplistic. What it does, it does well.It uses some nice fading and sliding effects. This game however obviously really lacks colour.All the fonts and graphics apart from where you are tracing your line are all inblack and white. This game really is just plain and simple black and white, and thegraphics show it. It's pretty drab. To be honest, the Game Boy Colour could have quite easily pulledthis game off. Well if it had 2 screens and touch controls.

Sounds are pretty standard. There are clicking sounds for when you select blocks andon the menus. There are some musical scores but they are uninspiring and you wouldn't behumming them like the amazingly great old Tetris tune of old.

To round this game up, I feel that it is an achievement. It is probably the bestpuzzle game I've played in quite a while. It is very addictive and a lot of fun. Butthe puzzle mode has a replay factor of absolute zero. Anyone who would go back to itfor fun would be a mad man. The challenge mode could bring people back though, see ifthey could score 1000 lines and above.