Ah, the puzzle game. Harvester of free time, producer of bloodshot eyes, how we bend to your will in the name of high scores. How many fluorescent polygons have we gamers aligned and vanquished over the years? The number is surely incalculable - sort of like the number of puzzle games that continue to filter onto store shelves. And with the current trend of porting Flash-based puzzle games to consoles, we're getting stuck with watered-down, uninspired, simplistic exercises in repetition instead of the mind-bending, frustration-inducing puzzlers we deserve.

7 Wonders of the Ancient World is probably familiar to anyone who's wasted too much time on the Internet. It's been out through Big Fish Games for some time and unfortunately the PS2 version adds nothing new to the ageing formula. If you've played it online then you know what to expect, but just in case you've never heard of it, I'll lay it all down for you. Despite being a straightforward puzzle game, 7 Wonders does deserve some credit for framing the gameplay around a goal other than the coveted high score from gaming days of old. Instead, you are tasked with building each of the seven ancient world wonders: the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus, the Temple of Artemis, the Mausoleum of Maussollos, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. This is the basis for each mode, but the Story Mode sees you constructing each wonder in order and keeps track of how long it takes you build them.

Each wonder contains several stages in which six different runes occupy variations of a square grid. The objective is simple - match three identical runes in a vertical or horizontal row by switching places with adjacent runes. Once this happens, those runes disappear and others fall into the space you've created. You keep doing this until a magical capstone appears within the grid, then you have to filter the capstone to the bottom of the grid, where it falls onto a conveyor belt. Toss in three special runes - a fireball, a lightning ball and a star rune - which clear out large amounts of runes and there's the extent of the gameplay. However, this is where the theme of the game comes in - when you match three runes, building materials fall to the floor and tiny builders pick them up. You must clear a certain amount of materials (including the capstone) in order to complete that stage of the wonder. When all stages are complete, so is your wonder, in all its splendor. And you must do all this in a time limit or suffer the penalty of losing a life. Once you lose all your lives you... continue where you left off with the only penalty being losing your accumulated score up to that point, which makes the concept of losing non-threatening.

Just like most genres, puzzle games are formulaic - in fact, probably more so than others. Typically, as the levels progress, new blocks or special powers are added and the difficulty is amped up. An extra point goes to 7 Wonders for shirking that convention, but I'm taking two away because it's sort of necessary to make the genre challenging and fun. Okay, to be fair, the sixth and final rune doesn't appear until you've completed the first couple wonders, but it's hardly noticeable. The only difficulty lies in the not-quite-a-square grids, which have nooks and crannies that make certain building materials harder to clear. I think a good puzzle game makes you lose because of your own failings - combinations you didn't see, not capitalizing on combos and so on - but when you lose in 7 Wonders it's usually because the game isn't giving you enough combinations to progress. It's often that you've got most or all of your materials cleared, but the capstone is stuck near the bottom where no combinations are open. When you throw in that you basically have unlimited lives it becomes a game of chance, playing a level over again and hoping for good combinations. To me, that's just poor game design.

Though there will be some who've never played the online version of 7 Wonders, it's difficult for someone who has to avoid comparing them. The Flash version is attractive, detailed and, most importantly, visible. The PS2 version apparently has trouble scaling it down, as it seems to scrunch everything on screen and appears muddy; after a while it can be headache-inducing. On the sides of the grid there are little builders carrying out various actions, some which appear to be fairly humorous, but again, where the Flash version displays these well, the console blurs them all together to ill effect. Had the developers not included the builders they might have been able to display the gameplay grid more effectively, but a port's a port, I guess.

Where the graphics suffer, the music has survived the transition; though the tracks loop fairly quickly, they keep a solid rhythm that's appropriate for a puzzle game. Throw in catchy Egyptian and tribal themes and they fit the package well. It would've been nice to have a different tune for each wonder, but apparently that's too much to ask! The sound effects are kept light and subtle, which is a must for a game where you hear the same sounds time and time again - if this game were solely rated for its sound design, things might be a little brighter.

7 Wonders of the Ancient World isn't a bad puzzle game, it's just that there are so many more puzzlers out there that surpass it. With a difficulty factor that warrants only a few stages to master, not even the $19.99 price tag can save hordes of copies from dump-bin doom. Another factor damning this title is the PS2 format; with both the popularity and selection of puzzle games available on Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and handheld systems it's hard to justify the purchase and play-through of a game that's not only poorly ported, but just as archaic in its gameplay as the wonders you're tasked with constructing.

Reviewed by Scott Schmidt for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).