Giveaway of the Day - Lumen

5 minute Review of Lumen:

Installation:

The 5.25Mb downloaded zip file opens up a read me and combined activation and setup file. And expands to 15.8Mb on installation. As usual with Merscom games the installed game does not install desktop or sart menu shortcuts. When you install the game be sure to make a note of where the game is installed to. According to the read me the defauly location is C:\Games\Lumen, but I noticed when installing this version that it tried to install itself to yesterdays game path, so be sure to check the path before committing the installation. If you’re not sure how to create a start menu (or desktop) shortcut see the tutorial in the games discussion thread:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/2594

The Game:

This is a great puzzle game with 115 levels to work through. You have to move mirrors to reflect a laser beam to its destination. Every time you cross the beam with the emitter you damage the emitter; do that enough times and you lose the level. There are eight different locations to discover starting in Egypt and ending in Atlantis. Game play is good, starting off with a relatively easy puzzle to solve which gets progressively harder the further into the game you go. There are doors to be unlocked and you have to charge your batteries by directing the laser beam through recharge pods. You can create multiple profiles and you progress is automatically saved at the end of each level. The game is fully mouse controlled

uninstalling:

Again (as with most games from this distributor) there is no uninstaller, which is strange, because the version I briefly tested for the mini review did have one. Anyway, the only way to uninstall this game is to go to where it was installed (usually C:\Games\Lumen) and manually delete it. You’ll find some residual registry entries, but in the main these will be from the most recent application opened registry key and from when you unwrapped it from the zip file.

Review to read:

http://virginmedia.gamesplanet.com/produit.html?product_id=612&category_id=20

Video’s:

Big Fish Video, click on the green button:

http://www.bigfishgames.com/download-games/1109/lumen/index.html

System Requirements:

Windows 98/2000/Me/XP/Vista
Processor: Pentium 450 MHz
32 MB RAM
Free hard drive space: 8 MB
32MB VRAM

Conclusion:

This is quite a decent and good looking game though with my limited experience with the game (I left it a little late to give it a play test; I can only give a very guarded opinion of the game. And for this reason can only give a tentative score of 7. I’m shocked to see the price being quoted here for $19.99 because I saw it selling for only $6 last night while looking for some decent reviews????

The game play is entertaining in small doses, but I personally didn’t find enough to keep me captivated for more than a few plus levels, which would lead me to the conclusion that it’s probably a great game for those indeterminable moments you sometimes have spare and wonder what to do with your time. But it’s not a game I could sit down and play for hours at a time.

This could be a neat little game if it had video settings.
It’s not anything I like to play in fullscreen mode, feels like a waste of screen space.