Puz: Big Kahuna Reef [by Reflexive Entertainment]

Game Review: Big Kahuna Reef
Release Date: December 24, 2004
Reviewer: Moritz Voss
Developer: Reflexive Entertainment
Genre: Puzzle
System Requirements: Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP, 400 MHz, DirectX® 7+, 64 MB RAM
Players: 1-8
Price: $19.95
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The water is a warm 80 degrees, and the temperatures at the beach are in the low 90s. A gentle breeze cools your skin as you watch the colorful fish swimming among the reefs below your boat. Ready for an instant vacation to Hawaii? No need to book an expensive flight, because Reflexive Entertainment brings us Big Kahuna Reef!

Basically, it’s a puzzle game where you have to swap pieces around on a playing board in order to create triplets or quadruplets of matching objects, which will disappear, then other pieces fall into their places. Your goal is to create enough matches to have covered the playing area at least once, or sometimes twice depending on the tiles the board is made of. Sound a lot like Jewels and similar games? True, but Big Kahuna Reef manages to excel.

The first things I noticed were the great graphics and the wonderful music. The playing field is a submerged array of wooden planks and other flotsam, in front of a beautiful reef with nicely animated fish swimming all around it. The playing pieces are white and black pearls, shrimps, starfish, and other things you might find at a South Seas island beach. The game greets you with a friendly and intuitive tutorial, explaining the mechanics and peculiarities of the game. Between levels, you can watch your reef, to which you can add new varieties of fish with each level you solve.

While looking at these reefs, I was thinking: “Hey, that’d be a nice screen saver!” Guess what – the game can be set as your Windows screen saver at the push of a button. Great idea! My friend immediately made Big Kahuna Reef her default screen saver, since it looks so good.

But the big innovation lies in Reflexive Entertainment’s MouseParty™ game modes. Big Kahuna Reef has such a mode. Every game with the MouseParty logo allows you to hook up additional mice to your Computer (Windows XP required) and lets up to 8 players play at the same time. Everybody gets a blank mouse cursor for which they can pick one of 8 colours. You pick whether you want to play competitively or cooperatively, and off you go – you and two, three, or up to seven friends all playing on the same screen. In competitive mode, players can paint the squares they matched first in their respective colours, and at the end of each level, these scores are compared and a winner is declared.

By offering both a very enjoyable and relaxing single player mode, as well as the furious MouseParty mode, Big Kahuna Reef really stands out from the crowd.

Two big kahuna surfin’ thumbs up, dudes!


Graphics: 10
Big Kahuna Reef has smoothly animated fish, crisp and easily distinguishable playing pieces, and some very pretty background images. I really like the graphics, and among the various Jewels spin-offs I’ve seen, this is certainly one of the best looking ones. You will also notice that many things you discover in the game are self-explanatory because the graphics are so detailed and well-made. Please note that the game may look a little distorted on some widescreen displays, so download the trial version before purchasing in case you’re unsure.

Sound: 9
The soundtrack is a really mellow piece of Hawaiian/South Seas music, recorded in excellent quality. I can actually feel the white sand under my bare feet and the warm breeze on my sun-tanned skin (yeah right!) while listening to Big Kahuna Reef… awesome! It is, however, a pity that there’s only this one short piece of background music for all the levels and game modes, and that it’s not perfectly looping, either. The game’s sound effects are good and fit the mood, and they actually give aural cues while you’re playing. Well done!

Game Play: 10
Big Kahuna Reef does most things right in this department, let me assure you. At no point in the (single player) game do you feel out of control. It adds a nice collection of innovative features to the original game concept of swapping pieces on a board to create matching triplets. The MouseParty™ mode is already a blast with three players (I dare you to actually hook up eight mice to your PC and find out what a eight player MouseParty feels like!), although it has to be said that it is really chaotic and takes away a lot of the game’s mellowness. Nonetheless, this sets it apart from so many other games, which are either for parties, or for casual play during your coffee breaks, but never for both kinds of occasions.

Value: 10
You get a great game for relaxing puzzle sessions, including 150 levels and a level editor for endless additional reefs to play on. At the same time, you get a great game to play with friends or your kids, assuming you have two or more mice you can hook up to your computer. And on top of that, you get a very nice-looking screen saver. You can also download additional levels from the game’s home page, and there’s a discussion forum for the game, as well.

Concept: 9
It’s Jewels, all right, but with a twist! Big Kahuna Reef makes the most out of its concept, and you will notice this from the very beginning, when the game greets you with a decent and intuitive tutorial, and slowly adds more rules and components to the game as you progress through the first dozen levels. The reef scenario and the playing areas that take various shapes are a nice touch after seeing jewels, gems, and more jewels on strictly rectangular boards in so many other games.

Fun: 9
The game is only slightly addicting, but that’s actually good. You’ll be easily hooked in the beginning, only to find out that Big Kahuna Reef is much like an instant vacation that you can return to for a few minutes any time you want. In single player, it’s a very mellow game, indeed! Multi player is quite the opposite, and rather wild. However, I think that the competitive multi player modes aren’t as much fun as they could be, simply because there is so much happening on the screen at once that it starts wearing you out rather quickly.

Overall: 10
This is an excellent puzzle game, and you definitely should play the free trial version to experience it yourself. Big Kahuna Reef is never frustrating and never unfair, the time limits are generous yet challenging, and there is even a “Relaxed Play” mode if you like it slow. The general mood of the game is just like a vacation on Hawaii - now where did I leave my Caipirinha and my sunglasses?

Added: April 12th 2005
Reviewer: Moritz Voss
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