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Mahjong Tales: Ancient Wisdom (ps3)

There have been many Mahjong games so you would have thought there would be a cookie cutter template for these things, yet somehow 'Creat Studios' have got it wrong.

The game is as expected and features a standard story mode of five different tile sets each with nine different layouts which follow the rules we have all come to know and love. Between each completion of a layout you are given a cut scene in the style of hand drawn art.

As well as the story mode the game also features 'infinity' in which there are layouts with three times as many tiles as normal, 'motion' mode where it is given an action twist by making you use tiles that are pushed around the board, before they meet their fiery doom plus the addition of 'special' tiles. Also featured is two player online competitive matches. All of this sounds good on paper, so how did they mess it up I hear you ask.

First of the controls are incredibly annoying even with the cursor speed turned up to the maximum setting, you will constantly find yourself clicking the wrong tile or the cursor will unhelpfully clip to a tile you didn't intend. The cut scenes look as if they have been drawn by a GCSE Art student on a bad day and even the voice over that accompanies these scenes have been botched in that the volume is erratic and seems to echo intermittently and for no reason the voice over artist seemingly changes his mood from super exciting to depressingly sad from layout to layout.

The multiplayer simply does not work, if you manage to find another lonely soul to play against there is so much lag that it is unplayable. Trophies and custom sound tracks are present which is a small plus, however many of the trophies entail multiplayer interaction which means these are going to be quite impossible to obtain. The trophies are also ridiculously time consuming; for example one trophy specifies you must complete one hundred layouts on 'infinity' mode, with each layout taking on average twelve minutes to complete you would need to spend twenty hours to receive one silver trophy.

Moreover the overall art style is horrible, the interface looks as if it has been pulled from a SNES game, the tiles are difficult to read on a standard definition TV and price does not reflect the value of the game.

Everything about this game is cheap and badly executed and how this game passed through the normally high quality control of the store is a mystery.

Overall even if you are a die-hard Mahjong fan you will be far better of finding a Flash version online and saving you money for far superior titles.

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