Publisher/Developer: G5 Entertainment
Genre: Mahjongg
Price: $4.99 (On sale for $0.99 as of publication)
Verdict: Excellent Mahjongg game that is strongly recommended to new and old players alike.
Pros: Great example of Mahjongg
Cons:No autosave can get irritating

As a change from a usual schedule, I want to start with a little history lesson. According to all the history books ever made, Mahjongg is pretty old. Certainly older than most other games you see on your iPhone, clocking in at around 150 years old depending on which theory you believe. It’s no surprise why it’s stuck around for so long as it’s pretty good fun. There are a few different variants of the game with arguably two being the most popular. One is a four player version a little bit like Rummy or Dominos, while the other is the one that is most often demonstrated in games such as Mahjongg Artifacts 2. For those of you who have never played a Mahjongg game of this type, it involves a screen full of tiles all with different symbols, essentially you have to match the tiles together. Thankfully it’s not as simple as that, otherwise we’d have a pretty tedious game on our hands. You can only choose a tile that isn’t ‘trapped’ amongst the other tiles, each board is arranged in a way that means you have to ‘unlock’ other tiles to reach them so that you can complete the puzzle. Make too many wrong moves and you’ll be stuck with no moves left to play.

Mahjongg Artifacts 2 is a great example of Mahjongg. The controls are extraordinarily simple and very easy to get to grips with. With a game of this type, it would look silly with overly fancy graphics but the tiles on display here have the appropriate amount of detail to them. Offering three different modes of play, there is plenty to get busy with. If like me, you like a bit of structure to your gaming, quest mode is ideal. It offers 25 levels of Mahjongg ‘action’ with a fairly flimsy storyline to link the levels together. Admittedly the storyline will never win any prizes for good storytelling but it was nice of the developer to at least try. Then, there is the classic mode which offers 99 levels, and the endless mode which is…well it’s endless. In game, to make things a little easier, you collect up green pearls every time you make a match, these pearls are then used to provide you with the option to undo your previous move, provide hints and to ’shake’ the board up moving all the tiles around.

I found Mahjongg Artifacts good, clean fun. Sure it might not be a fast moving game and certainly not one for the adrenaline fiends, but it’s satisfying to complete a puzzle and overall, just plain good fun. At currently a mere $0.99 it’s really hard not to recommend it, even if you don’t normally play this kind of game. I guarantee the five minutes you devote to this game will suddenly become an hour or two as you aim to complete the quest mode, even if you’re not really fussed about the story.