Travel Riddles: Trip to France

Taking trips is not easy for most people, mainly because they require planning and a fair amount of money if you want to leave the country. Going somewhere like Paris or Spain is even more expensive if you are not from Europe, so the trip better be worth it. On the other hand, there’s nothing better than being somewhere nice and enjoying your life.

Travel Riddles: Trip to France is a match-3 game in which your goal is to pass levels by solving a variety of simple puzzles and matching symbols in order to score points. Granted, there are a couple of other mini-games in there as well, so the experience is not as repetitive as you believe at first. Even so, very little changes in regards to the actual match-3 sections.

Each location you visit holds a couple of stages, and each stage features multiple levels. This formula keeps you busy at all times, but it’s a bit annoying that nothing really changes for long periods of time. Thus, each level challenges you to either bring a couple of artifact pieces to the bottom of the board, or to score a certain number of points in a set number of moves.

Although some levels provide you with something like 20 or even fewer moves to reach a certain score, all of them actually have a move limit, but it’s usually too high to give you any trouble. It gets more difficult later on, but it’s never difficult enough to keep you engaged and concentrated, which might cause early onset boredom sometimes.

As for the mini-games, jigsaw puzzles are pretty fun and straightforward, but they fail to inspire the energy needed to go back to matching a handful of symbols for hours on end. The graphics are not bad, as far as the visual chapter is concerned, but there’s nothing truly beautiful to look at. Each city has a different picture in the background, but since the whole game window is covered by tiles, that doesn’t really help.

In the end, Travel Riddles: Trip to France could have done a lot more with ideas it started from, but the end product is nothing more than a generic match-3 game. Hence, if you are a fan of the genre you might be able to waste a few hours with it, but otherwise there are far better alternatives out there.