So Wind and Water Puzzle Battles showed up in the letter box this morning, so I promptly did a video of the excitement of getting a brand new Dreamcast game, showing the game's highly professional packaging as well as a quick look at the game running on the system. I'm very impressed by just how slick the presentation of both the manual and the game itself is, the Yuan Works team (all two of them!) are evidentially very passionate when it comes to making games, I hope we see more from them in the near future.

So my first impressions on the game? The story mode is the game's strongest point: you get a Super mario 3 like hub map where you'll bump into characters to chat to (two of which are based on the Yuan brothers themselves) and plenty of different mission based stages to play, that on completion open up more of the map. There is also a shop to buy items from and great little mini games to be found. The dialog between the characters in a great laugh: the game's story is based around Amy who has been deemed the task of teaching everyone how to play the game despite being a bit of a air head, while the game is still being developed around you by the Yuan brothers. One particularly amusing moment was coming across a little kid who was on his way to a RPG school, holding a giant, Final Fantasy VII like sword. There is also a arcade mode and a very clever puzzle mode where you only get one or two moves to clear all the blocks.

As for the gameplay, so far I'm finding it quite challenging at say the least. It's rather simple to get into, but deceivingly tricky once you start to get deeper into it, especially when facing CPU opponents. The game requires very quick reflexes and the ability to manipulate the blocks you swift about very strategically. Personally I tend to hold my own pretty well in puzzle games but in this case I'm getting my arse whupped. I still haven't even beaten the first opponent you need to face in the story mode yet after quite a few attempts, he just manages to throw me out of the game in seconds with his super quick maneuvers.

So at the moment I'm struggling to keep up with it but I'm going to stick with it and see if i can get better, so this game may even be able to pull me away from LittleBigPlanet for a bit, so that's something. When I said in the video the review will be by the end of the week it'll probably be more like next week as I want to play quite far through it first.