I think I should start this review by saying that I am going to be very bias. I suppose, really, I’m bias with all of my reviews, but in this particular case I associate the game very strongly with an old friend of mine – someone I’ve not seen in a long time. As a result, when I play, it makes me nostalgic and provides me with a happy reminder of him. Perhaps it’s best to view this reviews as a documentation of the feelings that each thing evokes in me and, in that sense, I am wholly unbiased as I know my own emotions.

So, anyway, the game! Professor Layton and his young companion Luke travel to a village called St. Mystere, where they have been invited to solve the mystery of the ‘Golden Apple’ – all of which ties into the will of a recently deceased Baron. The two of them then explore the village in an attempt to get to the bottom of things, encountering many puzzle-loving villagers along the way.

The game is a point and click adventure, so you’ll have a view of a certain part of the town and click on the building you want to enter or the person you want to speak to. People tend to say “I’ll tell you something useful if you solve this puzzle” and then you’ll be given a puzzle to solve. These puzzles vary significantly – sometimes you’re sliding tiles around on the touch screen, sometimes you have to use mathematics, other times a scenario is explained and you really have to think outside of the book to determine the outcome. Puzzles vary in difficulty from sometimes being very easy to sometimes being enormously hard. I liked the variety and sometimes solving a hard puzzle was deeply satisfying (and made me feel intelligent.)

What took me by surprise is the game’s level of emotional depth. From the setup, you’re probably not going to expect all that much in terms of story, but actually there were a lot of unexpected twists and I found the end rather moving. To top it all off, there’s a really beautiful soundtrack throughout and a great soundtrack always brings emotions to the surface, in my experience.

The characters were all quite charming as well, particularly Layton and Luke themselves. Layton wants to be the perfect gentleman and that’s exactly what he is, while Luke is provides innocence and wonder. It wasn’t just the main characters though: the small characters all tended to have some interesting features to them, even if it was just the fact that they were comically ugly. Nobody is a normal, forgettable person.

I had never played a game like this before and, to be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect. When I got to the end of it, I couldn’t wait to get onto the sequels, because I was hooked! This is a superb addition to the DS library. (Bad news for anybody playing it for the first time now, though, is that extra downloadable puzzles, available via the internet, can no longer be played – I wasn’t really sure where to fit that in, but it’s a shame.)

Rating: 9.5/10

Buy it here.

Growing up, I always used to think Crash Bandicoot looked really cool. I never really had any of his games as a child, but I wanted them. I even had a couple of toys that you get out of a machine when you put £1 in. Now that I’ve finally played it as an adult, I can see that I would have loved it if I had played as a child.

It’s basically a mixture between classic 2D side scrolling games and early 3D platformers and as those are two things that I enjoy very much, I had a lot of fun with it. Some levels are standard side scrollers, some levels have you moving forward or backward down a set path and other levels are a little bit of a mixture.

A lot of the time, with these older games, you find that the controls have aged badly, but that is certainly not the case with Crash Bandicoot – it felt very tight. When you lose, it feels like you’ve lost because you jumped at the wrong time (or made some other mistake) and when you win, you feel like it was down to pure skill. This fact alone should be very appealing to a lot of people.

The real icing on the cake is how nice all of the game’s environments are. Sometimes you’re taking a path down a jungle. Sometimes you’re exploring an ancient temple. Sometimes you’re floating down a river on a leaf. Other times you’re on a rickety bridge up in the clouds and it’s really annoying… but I digress. It’s probably just nostalgia talking, but I love seeing natural environments created with early 3D graphics. I will admit, though, that they did reuse certain level archetypes a few too many times, meaning that it did get a bit repetitive from time to time.

The biggest problem this game has is its difficulty. It can get really tough at times. You’ll have to jump off moving platforms to land on (and bounce off) flying enemies, while avoiding other enemies and timing anything slightly wrong will lead you falling off the screen and being sent back to the last check point. More casual players are likely to have a lot of trouble with later levels – I certainly did! It was so bad that I almost lost interest in the game. Even saving the game becomes difficult, because it depends on you finding secret tokens within the levels and then successfully completing a tricky mini game. This then means that you end up having to play the hardest levels multiple times. If you’re aiming for 100% – good luck to you. That is going to be extremely hard.

Nonetheless, while the difficulty is problematic, I still think that this is definitely worth playing. You may give up before the end, but the earlier levels are a lot of fun. It’s a game with a lot of historical significance (Crash was kind of Sony’s mascot at the time) and one which holds up pretty well.

Rating: 8.3/10

Buy it here.