Adrenaline Gaming Zone

Magic Ludo

By Bladeex1 - February 3, 2010 - 08:50 UTC - Be first to Comment!

Start off with 4 pawns and get each one from start to home first and you win.  Wait a minute – this game looks awfully familiar. I remember growing up playing this game.  Wait a minute…never mind. That was, Sorry!  That’s exactly what Magic Ludo will remind you of at first glance, but there definitely are more differences than similarities.

Magic Ludo is based upon a classic board game simply called Ludo.  There are two modes of play in Magic Ludo.  There’s challenge mode and casual mode.   Challenge mode embarks you on game play through 13 levels of competition against the CPU.  Level 1 of Challenge mode is a tutorial that teaches you the traditional Classic rules of Ludo on the classic board.  As you progress through the levels you’ll be introduced to the Chinese and African variants as well.  You’ll play through tutorials to learn the rules of these variants as well as being introduced to 2 new game boards.  As you progress through the levels you’ll encounter different challenges, which means the object of the game isn’t always to get your entire team of pawns home first.  Sometimes you just need to get a certain amount of kills to your opponent players (land on the same square your opponent occupies) or perform certain actions that are based upon the rules of the game.

Casual play offers you the option to choose Classic, Chinese or African based game variants and which board you’d like to play them on (Classic, Chinese, and Tower).  Casual mode offers you several missions within each of these game types that you must complete in order to unlock new missions.

The rules of Ludo are simple.  Each player gets their turn at rolling the die in a clockwise fashion.  A player can only move a player out of start with the roll of a 6.  Rolling a 6 also affords you a free roll of the die thereafter.  In Classic mode when you land on a space already being occupied, you kill that opponent and send them back to start.  You can also jump opponent pieces in your way to play out your turn.  Your main objective in Classic mode is to get your entire team of pawns home.  For instance in Chinese mode, you can stack, or group if you will, your pawns together if you land on the same spot another one of your pawns occupies.  This makes you more invulnerable as you cannot be jumped or killed by a lesser amount of pawns.  So, if you stack 3 pawns together, you cannot be killed or jumped by an opponent with a group of 2.  African mode is similar to Chinese mode as far as stacking your pawns.  The difference is that you can kill a stack of 2 or 3 pawns, but you sacrifice yourself back to start.  If you kill a stack of 2 with your single pawn, your pawn gets sent back to start and they lose one pawn as well.  Another difference is that stacks move slower throughout the board.  If you roll a 6 you can only move 3 spaces.  Basically, you divide what you rolled by 2 and round up.

Magic Ludo is a great if you like fast-paced casual gaming.  What you will discover is how annoyed you will get by the cheap moves of your CPU opponents.  If an opponent is behind you, expect to have your piece killed and sent home 99.9% of the time.  Expect that it make take 20+ rolls of the die before you even can get a pawn out of start.  Some of the challenges are difficult to achieve and it just takes repeated attempt after repeated attempt to complete.  You’ll constantly find yourself feeling cheated over and over again, but that’s just bad programming practice if you ask me.

There’s also no music to soothe your nerves when the game is getting you down.  And believe me it will.  You’ll also notice the bad grammar during the tutorial levels.  I was fortunate enough to still understand the gist of what’s going on.  Another feature that would’ve made the experience cooler would’ve been the ability to roll the die by shaking the iPhone/iPod Touch.  I guess you can’t have it all, right?

The plus side of Magic Ludo is that it’s free from the App Store.  This is achieved by the rolling in-game ads, but they do not hinder your experience at all.  There’s no other version to purchase that doesn’t encompass ads so, deal with it.  Another plus to Magic Ludo is the ability to expand your game play experience.  For those that can’t absolutely get enough of Magic Ludo – you can download bonus levels beyond the original 13.  You can also opt to purchase an “unlocking” of all the locked levels, so that you don’t have to endure certain challenges.  Having access and download extra content from within the app itself is a plus.

Magic Ludo is available for free and how can you go wrong with that?  Give it a shot and you may find that you’ll actually pass hours away while engaged in completing the challenges that await.

By TeLeKiNeSiS