Ace Mathician (DS) review "It's always fantastic when, after nearly 40 years of playing games, one discovers an entirely original gameplay concept."

It's always fantastic when, after nearly 40 years of playing games, one discovers an entirely original gameplay concept in the most unusual of places - and let's face it, obscuring a great game behind that utterly awful name and the blandest character design in history is some kind of mad genius.

Ace Mathacian is a game wherein you must guide a cute bear to some fruit, yes, really. But hear me out. The bear and the fruit are on the top screen along with some large platforms that make up the level. A proportion of these blocks are outlined in red, which means they can be re-positioned to aide the bears traversal of the level and collection of all the fruit.

But it's the method of this platform re-positioning that is the genius of the game. On the lower screen are the elements of an algebraic equation. For example, the sum may be started already as 'y=' and you must add the other elements to this to affect the play area. Simply adding a 4, say, would raise all the red outlined bricks by 4 pixels. Solutions are rarely this simple, however, and often require several different arrangements of the same numbers and symbols to move the platforms to a variety of places so that the bear can reach all the fruit. In a very early level you need to raise the blocks by 4 initially, but then lower them afterwards by having the equation read 'y=1-9' to reach other goals.

These examples are among the earliest in the game, things get devilishly creative as you progress through the levels - and it's this that is the final piece of the games own equation, and the thing that makes it a stand-out puzzle game on a platform that has no shortage of them.

Community review by JaguarWong (June 13, 2021) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.