The DS has hosted a lot of great puzzle games with the innovative touchscreen, and NEVES (seven spelled backwards) is another one for the books.

NEVES is a popular board game in Japan and, because of the touch screen, has a great touch that feels like you’re sliding and turning real pieces.  The object of NEVES is to fit seven different geometric shapes into the silhouette shape on the board. What sounds naively simple can be painstakingly difficult. Within the first few puzzles I was already struggling to make what looked like a rabbit.

The touch controls are very intuitive and work very well, requiring only three simple maneuvers: to move, tap the piece with the stylus and drag it into the slot; to turn the piece, you tap little bubbles that appear on the corner and drag; and to flip, you double tap the piece. The controls feel great and really make this game fun to play.

There are four different modes to choose from in the game, featuring Silhouettes?, 7 Steps, Time Pressure, and Versus. Silhousettes? Is just the standard, time-free mode, perfect for training. Time Pressure is really the meat of the game, if you can call it that, and gives three minutes for completion of a puzzle. 7 Steps is excruciatingly hard from the get-go, only giving you 7 moves for the 7 pieces – no room for any mistakes.  The Versus mode grants a lot of replay value, since it only requires a single card to play with a friend.

Gameplay: 8.0
The touch controls work great and really make this game worth playing.

Graphics: 5.0
The presentation is extremely simple and at times very bland.

Sound: 4.0
The music is absolutely horrible. Cheesy, MIDI jazz recordings play all the time and just don’t complement the methodical simplicity of the game itself. The game would have been better with minimal music or some exotic tune of some kind.

Difficulty: Hard
The game is extremely simple, but gets oh-so hard very quickly.

Concept: 7.5
The mechanics of this game and the touch screen work together perfectly.

Multiplayer: 7.0
The multiplayer gives this game legs, but where is the Wi-Fi!!!

Overall: 7.0
Planet Puzzle League set the bar extremely high for puzzle games, especially with the use of Wi-Fi; and while NEVES doesn’t come close to the slick presentation of PPL, it has a very solid gameplay mechanic that will be attractive to fans of the game.