Jammin' It eSoft Style (Christmas review 9)

eSoft Interactive is the “home of the think and tap games”. The nice thing about such a mantra is a game doesn’t have to be overly complex to force you to think. Such is the case with Traffic Jam 2, eSoft Interactive’s latest offering. I never had the opportunity to play the first one, but I’m beginning to see why it’s maintained its place as one of their most popular games.

Your poor Beetle is trapped amongst a myriad of cars during rush hour, and it’s up to you to free it from each of the 250 precarious situations it’s gotten into. The task is simple enough: some cars move left and right, and others move forward and backward. You must slide the cars around until you’ve cleared a path between the beetle and the exit circle. To move a car, you simply click on it and then click on the square you want to move the car to. If a car takes up more than one square, the front of the car will occupy the destination square you’ve selected. There are two viewing modes for the game, 2D and 3D. In 3D (actually isometric) mode there is a 2D view of the playing field in the upper left corner of the screen. At times this will be quite useful, both to give you a different perspective on the layout of the cars, and to help you in selecting a car, as sometimes the isometric mode can be a bit finicky.

The game is comprised of 250 levels, and for each level you receive a time mark as well as a mark for the number of moves taken to complete the level. This doesn’t really translate to anything like a score, but you can always go back and play again to see if you can beat your time and / or number of moves on certain puzzles. You can, of course, also use this benchmark to compare against your friends. When the game starts out the puzzles are pretty straightforward, but as you climb up in levels they start throwing all kinds of snags in your thought process, like cars that take up more than 2 squares and squares that can’t even be used at all. You’ll eventually find yourself even moving cars in one direction just to move them back the other way later on in the level. After a while there’s definitely some thought involved in completing these puzzles. And, if you really get stuck, you will earn a token every ten levels that you can use to automatically complete a level.

For a puzzle game, the graphics are really good. There are no whiz bang special effects, per se, but the cars look good, especially in isometric mode. There’s nothing wrong with the 2D display, but you lose some of the nice features from special vehicles like the school bus or the truck that has eSoft written across it. I also think the background is pretty neat looking. It kind of gives me the impression of what an eSoft Interactive inspired version of the Sims might look like (hint, hint).

The sound effects, while minimal, worked pretty well. The one thing that might have been cool would have been to have a revving engine when a vehicle was selected, rather than the simple clicking noise heard now. I also ran into a glitch every once in a while where the car select noise would repeat over and over again until I did something else, but that was minor and by no means reproducible. There is only one song in the game, and at first I really didn’t care for it. As I’ve continued to play the game, however, I’ve actually grown to like the song. In fact, I actually don’t mind it playing in the background while I’m doing other things at my computer. It’s certainly not the best music in an eSoft game, but it does the job.

When I first started playing eSoft Interactive games I basically dismissed Traffic Jam as “not my sort of thing”. After playing the sequel, I realize I might just have made a mistake on that call. If you’re looking for a puzzle game that’s so easy it’s challenging, you’ve come to the right place. Good graphics, a catchy background song, and over 200 levels of mobile mayhem await you in another well conceived effort from eSoft Interactive.

Overall Score: 8/10