Buy Now...

For this next mixture of possible holiday locations to visit while solving a selection of puzzles, Tiny Little Lion has opted to take players Down Under to the land of kangaroos and kiwis.  As with earlier titles in this particular series, various decisions can be made regarding the game playing environment to enjoy gaining info about the locations and selecting the puzzles to solve.  As well as the gaming environment, you can also define the make-up of the puzzle playing aspect of the product.

While limiting itself to just two main formats of puzzles, the game does offer a range of other features for personalising the puzzle that needs to be completed.  Having decided whether to test yourself with a jigsaw or swap type puzzle, you can select from 26 different types of jigsaw piece shapes or 27 different swap elements.  This actually works out at just over 700 different options.

In the case of jigsaws, the pieces being used could be classified as animals, blobs, irregular rectangles, concentric hearts, ripples and split circles to mentioned just a selection.  When making a similar choice from the setting for swap puzzles, the actual choices could include double bands, octagon & squares, triangles and triple stripes.  I must admit to having only worked with a small samples of these different settings.  Depending upon the type of pieces, you can then select from various amounts of pieces.  Further options can be made regarding whether a rotation feature will be applied and the amount of hints available.

See also: Games

more

Having decided on the type and style of puzzle, you will need to select the image at the heart of the puzzle challenge.  The product comes with 125 images available for selection.  To help with making your choice, these images have been sub-divided into categories entitled Landmarks, Animals, City, Food, Others, Scenes, Close-up and Castles. 

While each of these categories gives you a choice of images, there is one further category that is initially empty.  This is a Custom category.  This location can be used to hold any of your personal images that you feel would be a suitable challenge for being the focal point for a jigsaw or swap puzzle.

While most of the work in solving the different puzzles will be carried out by the mouse, you will have access to a range of tools to assist you.  Depending upon the type of puzzles you will have access to tools such as Shuffle, Hint, Guide, Table style, Preview, Recenter and Zoom.  When necessary these tools can be called upon to perform their necessary duty.

Completed puzzles will be rewarded with an interesting fact regarding this targeted part of the world.  In some cases the presented fact could bear no relationship to the image being used.  Once example of this trend that I noticed was the fact offered concerned the yellow-eyed Penguins being native to the southern coast of New Zealand but the accompanying image was that of a litter of dogs.  Completed puzzles can be replayed with the same or different settings.

Confusion apart from mixing penguins with puppy dogs, I enjoyed the challenge of this game.  I downloaded my copy of this title from Gamehouse.com where it is priced at $9.99.  It is also available from Big Fish Games priced at £7.84.  This game requires a 2.0 GHz processor with 4096MB of RAM and 487MB of hard disk space running Windows 7 and later. 

Puzzle Vacations - Australia and New Zealand | Big Fish Games

Puzzle Vacations - Australia and New Zealand | GameHouse