Luxor 5th Passage

Luxor 5th Passage is a tile-matching action puzzle video game developed by Absolutist and published by MumboJumbo. Released on November 19, 2010 for the PC and Mac, it marked the 5th anniversary of the Luxor series.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) Boring and generic main menu design, coupled with an extremely chippy sphere animation.
 * 2) Bland map design, with almost all maps being totally static images. It doesn't help that the graphics are a downgrade from the previous games either.
 * 3) Little to no variety in the danger zones for the maps. Many of them are just horizontal straight lines with some small curves here and there.
 * 4) Excluding the People's Choice maps, there are only two double-path maps. Bastet's Fountain and Showdown with Set.
 * 5) * In addition to this, none of the maps have paths that intersect. That is, if you exclude the People's Choice maps too.
 * 6) Lots of reused assets from Luxor 2. Scarabs, spheres and shooters, powerup icons and frames, and even the aiming reticle.
 * 7) Recycled sound effects from previous Luxor games. Worse is that many of the sound effects are set at the wrong volume.
 * 8) * In addition, there are many mismatched sound effects, with the Fire Ball and Lightning Bolt using Luxor 2 powerup catch sounds and Luxor 3 powerup activation sounds.
 * 9) Forced 800x600 screen resolution.
 * 10) Some achievements are downright unobtainable.
 * 11) The last map, Showdown with Set, is very disappointing and boring compared to Temple of Set, Arma Megiddo, or The Wrath of Set.
 * 12) * It doesn't help that Stage 14-6, Showdown with Set, requires 1,230 destroyed spheres in order to be completed. This is more than twice as long as your average endgame level in any Luxor game.
 * 13) Accuracy drops when using the Lead Barrage or Lightning Bolt power-ups. The fact that Luxor 2 's accuracy system is used in this game makes this hurt even more.
 * 14) Mismatching music for People's Choice maps. Luxor 2 ' s music is used on some Luxor 3 maps, and vice versa.
 * 15) Stage 3-3, Bastet's Fountain, takes forever to complete on Easy difficulty. Guess what the viseMidMaxSpeed and viseMidMinSpeed values are? 8.035344443064. That's about the same as the viseMinSpeed values for some endgame levels in the previous Luxor games. So in other words, the spheres move slower than a snail's pace.
 * 16) Unimpressive UI font choice. At least it's not as generic as the Myriad Pro used in the Luxor HD series, but still, it will never compare to the Cancun/Signboard font that previous Luxor games used.
 * 17) Luxor 5th Passage does away with the progression system of older Luxor games by unlocking ALL maps - People's Choice included - right from the beginning.
 * 18) Tools of the Servant is a Blast Mode-exclusive map that never even appears in Adventure at all.
 * 19) No Survival, Practice, or Pharaoh's Challenge mode.
 * 20) Danger music is axed completely. How else besides the distorted heartbeats and flashing red warning flares from the pyramids will you tell that you are going to lose, especially on higher difficulties?
 * 21) Spheres just make a run for the pyramid where they lose at least 90% of their rolling speed.
 * 22) Many powerups are outright horrible or useless:
 * 23) * The Color Sort powerup is a gamebreaking one: if you fire at any spheres while the spheres are being color sorted, they turn permanently invisible, making this powerup a death sentence.
 * 24) * The Spiker powerup is extremely useless if you don't even fire it before it touches the top of the screen.
 * 25) * Lead Barrage. Not only does this kill your accuracy, but it's a downright copy of Zuma's Revenge 's Tri-Shot.
 * 26) * Double Shooter? Say goodbye to your accuracy.
 * 27) Forget about Color Cloud from Luxor 2.
 * 28) The scarabs that push the spheres are not properly animated, unlike Luxor 2 (and the Luxor HD trilogy), Luxor 3, and Luxor: Quest for the Afterlife.
 * 29) Blast Mode map previews show some maps with a totally different path design from the actual in-game one. Secret Tomb, Bastet's Fountain, and Shield of Horus are the biggest offenders.
 * 30) Copypasted ending text from Luxor 2 with no special cinematics whatsoever.
 * 31) Bonus Stages, reused from Luxor 2, but made worse by the fact that you get a Double Shooter if you score at least 85% accuracy on each level in the stage.
 * 32) The Eye of Horus feature. This is a level-ending feature that takes forever to power up, as it takes 100 jewels collected for this. None of the Adventure levels give enough jewels for the Eye of Horus (except if you mod the game, of course).

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The Double Shooter actually allows you to earn more Ankh Coins, as that powerup allows you to make matches of 7 or more more easily, which always spawn Ankh Coins for extra lives.
 * 2) Like Luxor 3 and Luxor: Quest for the Afterlife, the game highlights the entire map path(s) at the beginning of the level.
 * 3) The Net powerup actually stays on even at the end of the level where a bonus scarab comes out of the pyramid to spawn jewels and Ankh Coins.