In
Luxor Evolved HD, you will be required to tap the bottom left and right of the screen to move your ship back and forth, so that you can shoot the colored balls into the oncoming string of advancing balls in an attempt to match 3 or more and remove them. The goal is to keep the balls from entering your temple, although in the old
Luxor, once the balls hit your temple, the level had to be restarted. Now, that's not the case. It simply sends the ball line rolling back a ways and gives you another chance. I don't really notice any penalty other than a notification that says "Pyramid Breached!" aside from losing one of your three lives. I guess this serves to keep some of your progress instead of having to restart the entire level over again.
Using the mouse in the PC version, your ship moved smoothly along the bottom of the screen and clicking your left mouse key sent a ball sailing to wherever you pointed, but tapping to move your ship and tapping to send the balls flying is far less responsive. Instead of moving smoothly, your ship skitters and jumps across the bottom of the screen and when you tap to release a ball, it may or may not work, causing you to tap again rapidly to send a ball out. This can also cause you to send out a ball that you didn't mean to in your attempt to send out one you did intend on sending, which means you now have a wrong colored ball in the middle of an area that could have been cleared had the game responded when you tapped the correct ball color to send.
The game will reward you with powerups that will fall when you clear sections of colored balls and these can be anything from a powerup that stops everything, slows it down, sends a fireball to clear out a large area and so on. I will say that I never really learned which powerup was which, based on color or design, because everything looked so similar that I just grabbed whatever came my way. There are even more powerful powerups that can be earned as you progress, since you unlock them as you go, but again, I wasn't driven to do so because the game offered more frustration than fun. There is also treasure and hearts that will drop and you can collect them to earn additional lives and such.
While you can somewhat modify controls to suit you, they don't make much difference and it doesn't fix the fact that they don't respond properly. Being able to change the ball shooter position slightly or change from a swipe to lifting your finger off the screen to rotate out colored balls isn't much assistance.
Overall, if you have played and enjoyed Luxor on the PC, I can't recommend Luxor Evolved HD on the iPad. While the basic concept is there, unresponsive controls ruin the fun. Even if you haven't played it on other systems, you will probably be frustrated by the controls. If they can fix the controls, it might be a great addition to your iPad gaming library, but as it stands, this one is best left behind.
