First and foremost, this is not your PC's Luxor. When MumboJumbo says Luxor Evolved, they mean it, at least visually. Luxor Evolved HD takes the Egyptian-inspired ball shooter and turns it on its head. The result is a chaotic blend of Tron and Techno, although that is not necessarily a good thing.

Luxor Evolved HD looks pretty, don't get me wrong. The levels are now constructed of brightly colored line drawings with an inky black background. Everything feels like something from the movie Tron and all of the songs have been remixed into Techno versions of their former selves. While I understand the need for a new aesthetic, Luxor Evolved HD loses its charm in giving up its Egyptian design. Sure, the names are all still Egyptian, but that just makes it seem weird.

Let me first say that I have been a Luxor fan for years and years. I still play an older version on my PC while I am on the phone or doing something that doesn't suffer from a little gaming multitasking and the game still holds the same appeal and challenge as it did when I first loaded it many years ago. I was really excited to be able to play this new version of Luxor on my iPad because I thought it would make the translation to gesture-based gameplay really well, much like time management games do on the iPad. I was completely wrong, but this mainly has to do with control, which I will discuss more thoroughly in Game Mechanics.

The basic premise of Luxor Evolved HD is that you are a ship at the bottom of the screen and your goal is to keep the ever-advancing line of colored balls from reaching your pyramid. You do this by shooting like colored balls into sets of two or more to eliminate the area with a match-3. If you destroy a set of colored balls that happens to be between two sets of the same color, the row will back up so that these match up and are then destroyed as well. This way, you can not only destroy the advancing line, but actually get it to back up away from your temple. It's a great concept, but this version just wasn't nearly as much fun as the PC version because of the similar aesthetic of everything on the level and the shoddy controls (see below).

Boss fights are even more frustrating in Luxor Evolved HD. Here, you have a "boss" cluster of balls at the top of the screen circling around continuously. There's a "guard" that you must eliminate to be able to shoot out the boss balls, but this guard is also creating distraction ball lines to advance on your temple. So you must manage the advancing lines that come out of nowhere, destroy the guard and then eliminate the circling row of balls at the top. It can be done, but it's just not that much fun.

There are also bonus rounds to earn extra points and goodies, but the first one I encountered wouldn't allow me to actually shoot all of the balls. My ability to shoot basically quit working in the middle of the level and I had to wait while the balls exited the level, watching my potential bonus points leave along with them. Not cool.

There are three levels of difficulty in Luxor Evolved HD: Casual, Normal and Hard. I mostly played the game on Normal, but the differences are that Casual provides you with unlimited lives and starts with fewer colors mixed throughout, meaning initially, you might have a ball line consisting of all blues and reds so you can clear it in two hits, whereas Normal might have a ball line with every few balls being a different color, taking more hits to clear. Hard is for expert players only, moving faster than Normal and having additional colors thrown into the mix.

Luxor Evolved HD is definitely challenging, as all past Luxor games have been, but the main difficulty comes in the form of frustrating and unresponsive controls. This doesn't make for a fun experience, only an aggravating and annoying one.

In Luxor Evolved HD, you will be required to tap the bottom left and right of the screen to move your ship back and forth, so that you can shoot the colored balls into the oncoming string of advancing balls in an attempt to match 3 or more and remove them. The goal is to keep the balls from entering your temple, although in the old Luxor, once the balls hit your temple, the level had to be restarted. Now, that's not the case. It simply sends the ball line rolling back a ways and gives you another chance. I don't really notice any penalty other than a notification that says "Pyramid Breached!" aside from losing one of your three lives. I guess this serves to keep some of your progress instead of having to restart the entire level over again.

Using the mouse in the PC version, your ship moved smoothly along the bottom of the screen and clicking your left mouse key sent a ball sailing to wherever you pointed, but tapping to move your ship and tapping to send the balls flying is far less responsive. Instead of moving smoothly, your ship skitters and jumps across the bottom of the screen and when you tap to release a ball, it may or may not work, causing you to tap again rapidly to send a ball out. This can also cause you to send out a ball that you didn't mean to in your attempt to send out one you did intend on sending, which means you now have a wrong colored ball in the middle of an area that could have been cleared had the game responded when you tapped the correct ball color to send.

The game will reward you with powerups that will fall when you clear sections of colored balls and these can be anything from a powerup that stops everything, slows it down, sends a fireball to clear out a large area and so on. I will say that I never really learned which powerup was which, based on color or design, because everything looked so similar that I just grabbed whatever came my way. There are even more powerful powerups that can be earned as you progress, since you unlock them as you go, but again, I wasn't driven to do so because the game offered more frustration than fun. There is also treasure and hearts that will drop and you can collect them to earn additional lives and such.

While you can somewhat modify controls to suit you, they don't make much difference and it doesn't fix the fact that they don't respond properly. Being able to change the ball shooter position slightly or change from a swipe to lifting your finger off the screen to rotate out colored balls isn't much assistance.

Overall, if you have played and enjoyed Luxor on the PC, I can't recommend Luxor Evolved HD on the iPad. While the basic concept is there, unresponsive controls ruin the fun. Even if you haven't played it on other systems, you will probably be frustrated by the controls. If they can fix the controls, it might be a great addition to your iPad gaming library, but as it stands, this one is best left behind.