4 Elements

I have always liked puzzle games. They do exactly what they are expected to do, they waste a bunch of time and they require learning a new way to look at some sort of board where you do something involving thinking. 4 elements is no different from this.
 
There is some sort of story in 4 elements about saving the world by returning the 4 elements to it, but really, who cares. The story is only there to move along the actual puzzle game-play which consists of finding pieces in a picture to make things with, the core puzzle game and then spotting the difference. In order to unlock the books that contain the puzzles you have to find pieces of tools and put them together in order to access other areas to find more tools so that you can finally get the key. This amounts to a find-hidden-things game which does not punish you at all for randomly clicking all over the place, which you will have to do eventually as some of the pieces are very well hidden. Also, you only get to do this four times as there are only four books to unlock representing each of the elements. This little puzzle is sort of fun but mostly it is too simplistic and it seems like the difficulty in the later ones is artificial and not some natural outgrowth of the experience. 
 
After this, you get access to the book where you have to "repower the elements" by allowing flowing energy to get to a big circle thing which gives the element book its power. You have to do this four times per card, and there are four cards in each book. There is no explanation for this really, and since it is magic and simply a way to get you to play a puzzle game, who cares. The core puzzle game of 4 elements consists of matching tiles of 3 or more in order to unlock the areas underneath so that the aforementioned energy can flow through them. At the beginning, this concept is very straightforward as you have a large area to move through and the number of tiles you can match up is always big. This works not like Bejeweled with gem switching but more like moving the cursor along a path of tiles that exceeds two. It is sort of hard to explain, but just understand that the tiles do not auto-solve, you have to do everything yourself. The more tiles you match up, the larger the explosion at the last tile you select. Any more than five tiles and you have an explosion of 1 tile size beside the last tile you select. More tiles than that leads to larger and larger explosions. These explosions are meant to clear the layers of stuff underneath the tiles, which is what impedes the flow of energy. The concept is very simple, but the execution gets more and more difficult as you go on. In the later stages you have to contend with single line areas where it is very hard to make a line of tiles, tiles covered in ice which essentially makes them double tiles (you have to connect stuff to them twice), and giant rocks which can only be broken by explosions or flaming arrows. 
 
All of this is intriguing as difficulty increases, but you eventually figure out that you simply need to employ some strategy in order to get a certain area. Most of these strategies you need to employ require using power-ups that are given to you as you finish the first book. They are, in order of unlocking: remove underneath tile, blow up tiles (and rocks and ice), switch tiles (in order to make combos), and reshuffle the board. You gain access to these power-ups by charging them by matching the tiles associated with each power up. Some of the levels absolutely require the first one unless you are lucky enough to have gotten the tiles to match with only a single line to do it. Which is kind of cheap in my opinion. If you are given a power-up it shouldn't be required to beat the level, it should simply be a last resort or a way to do it quicker. Another level of difficulty in the game is the camera. It follows the energy with mind of its own and does it at its own pace, sometimes blocking off your access to areas where you can match tiles to charge up your power-ups. This leaves you with very few tiles to match, eventually leading you to be unable to match any tiles at all. Don't worry though, because your trusty fairy friend comes along and reshuffles the board for free for you. She does this an unlimited number of times without penalty. So, you may ask, how is this game hard at all? The answer is, the time limit. This game's time limit is punishingly cruel (you will get used to seeing "Whatch(sic) the time, there isn't much remaining!"). I didn't have a problem with the time limit until level 55, and then after that every single level that I played was pretty much impossible to beat because time always ran out. I eventually had to turn off fullscreen and click away to pause the game before I planned my next move, and I still lost numerous times on level 55 and 56. Now admittedly, there are only 64 levels, so this was pretty close to the end, but it also came out of nowhere. I hit a wall and then it was impossible to get past it until I basically cheated. After 55 and 56, most of them repeated this impossible time limit, but a few were okay to beat. Of course, I was still cheating by the click away method, so who knows if it would have been impossible to do without it, but I am pretty sure it would have been.
 
On top of this, there is one level where you have to destroy every single tile in your way while the energy is moving along a snaking pah towards something that will essentially make further progress impossible. That means you have two separate time limits to deal with (and the actual time limit of two minutes is still pretty difficult on this level). So, while the game is fun, it seems arbitrarily difficult. It was almost as if the game developers came up with a fantastic set of increasingly difficult puzzles and then played them all and were like, now how do we make them hard.... I have it, time limits! I am not against time limits, but you shouldn't feel impeded by them until either the last few levels or until you have been sitting there staring at the screen for a few minutes wondering what to do next. After you have done four of these puzzle games, you have to play a spot-the-difference game where you can simply click at random without penalty again. I really have no comment on this game, as it goes by so quickly you soon forget about it. After you have finished all of the four books and returned the elements to the world, the game simply ends. No fireworks, no encore, no extra hard mode. If you wanna play again, just restart the whole thing.
 
All in all, 4 Elements is fun for about 6 hours. It brings a few new concepts to the genre but you really only get them at the beginning and then they stick with them for the rest of the game, offering nothing new as you progress but simply ramping up the difficulty. This is matched with different little games in between that are too easy in comparison. I finished the game in 7 hours, and I think the average person should finish it in 6-8 hours. How much fun you have during that time is up to you. If you play these games all the time and are really quick, you may never see an issue with the time limits. If you are like me, then you will be hindered by the time limit numerous times. Whether or not you decide to bend the rules as I did in order to beat the levels is up to you but it will affect how long it takes you to finish the game. 4 Elements is exactly what it is supposed to be and it does nothing to change my initial statement about puzzle games: Good time wasters that require new tactics with little re-playability.