Get On The Case!

Diamond thieves are running rampant and it's up to you to make things right! Using only your wits and your keen puzzle-solving abilities, you must return all of the stolen gems and bring the perpetrators to justice! Luckily for you, returning the stolen goods is as easy as highlighting rows of gems with matching colors; and all of these crooks are idiots!

The gameplay in Diamond Detective is simple yet fun. It's remarkably easy to catch on, and once you do, you'll be beating your old scores in no time flat. Each level presents you with a different shaped playing area, filled to the brim with shiny jewels. Using your mouse, you must select rows of similar-colored, adjacent gems to remove them and put them back into the vault. As you do this, more pieces will fall from the top, presenting you with an infinite supply of gems that would make even Queen Elizabeth jealous. As you work your pattern-making magic, the thief is getting away! You can see him (or her), in fact, scuttling along the bottom of the screen. If the thief makes it to the opposite edge of the screen, they escape into the night! Oh, also, you lose the level.

Riches Abound

Sadly, you're all alone in your quest for justice. However, you can make good use of special gems and tiles that will appear periodically. As you progress through the game, you will be introduced to more and more of these treasures, including:

• Rainbow Gem: Connects any color gem to any other color gem.
• Life Ring: These precious little artifacts stop the thief in his tracks, but only for a short time.
• Diamond: Connects any color gem to another gem of the same color.
• Diamond Bomb: Generates diamonds throughout the board.
• Coal: Someone must have been bad for Christmas! These will turn into diamonds once three separate chains are formed next to them.
• Dual Colored Tile: These are like two tiles in one. They connect with any tile that matches any of the colors shown.

Book'em, Danno

After each level, you'll be presented with a piece of evidence that the crook left behind. After you collect of the evidence, you'll get an opportunity to really test your detective skills. You'll be shown a lineup of six suspects. Using the process of elimination, you must compare all of the evidence to all of the suspects' profiles and rule out five of them. Once you do this, then you've got your man (or woman!).

Once you've solved the mystery, you must complete one last level to bring the perpetrator in. This level plays just like the normal levels, except instead of filling the vault, you have to turn all of the background tiles gold. You turn a tile gold by creating a row in front of it. Once all of the tiles are golden, the case is closed!

Diamond Detective is a fun puzzle game with a refreshing twist. Although the actual detective work may not be that deep, it's fun enough that you'll want to play through the entire game to take part in all of the cases. If you're a fan of puzzlers, this one is a whopper.