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Yes Treasures Of Montezuma Blitz Is Entirely Free To Play | PSNStores

Yes Treasures Of Montezuma Blitz Is Entirely Free To Play

Posted by on April 12th, 2012 | 0 Comments | Tags:

So I saw this article “The Free PS Vita Game That Isn’t Actually Free” pop up on Twitter today and knew exactly what game it was going to be about, Treasure of Montezuma Blitz. It is a new “freemium” game that was released this week on the PlayStation Vita via the PlayStation Store. There seems to be much confusion about how this game actually works, so I am here to let everyone in on the mysterious ways of the game.

Basically it breaks down like this: there are 2 different currencies used in game, jewels and hearts. Hearts are your numbers of games that you can play, your lives. Each time you play a game it costs one heart. You are given 5 hearts when you first start the game and that is the maximum you can have at any time. There are two different ways to regain hearts after you lose them and with any freemium game one way costs some cash. The free way to get more lives is simple, get up and walk away from your Vita for 5 minutes. After those 5 minutes are up you will gain one life. So if you want to get all five lives back you would have to wait 25 minutes. But there is nothing stopping you from playing with just 1, 2 or even 3 lives regained. The other way if for some reason you just can’t wait is to pay some money.

The game at no point forces you to pay money to continue playing the game. The author of the IGN article says, “If there’s a simple cool down period, why are gamers sent to the PS Store to buy more lives?” At no point do you get forcefully sent to the PS Store to buy more lives. Here is what the game says. If you choose Refill Now you are brought to the PlayStation Store where it even tells you at the bottom that you can get more lives for free by waiting. While I do think that an onscreen indicator for when you will be getting another life would be for the best, it clearly says that if you wait more lives will come.

The other in-game currency are gems, this is your money. Gems can be used to do all sorts of things in the game. Their main use is for bringing bonus tiles and totems into your game. Each bonus tile or totem has a cost that is associated with it which is deducted from your bank at the start of a round. If you do not have enough gems to use your equipped items you must remove them to continue playing for free otherwise the game will tell you to you buy more Gems for cash. Gems can also be used to unlock totems and bonuses early, you can however unlock them for free if you play the game enough.

Gems can be gained in a few ways. First there is a scratch ticket that you receive each day. You can win a fairly large sum from getting lucky on these. The next way is by eliminating tiles in-game that have gems attached to them. At the end of the round all of the gems you got are multiplied by your bonus and added to your bank. The last way to get more gems is to purchase them. But with all of these other ways you really don’t need to do this. The game is enjoyable to play even without bonuses and totems if you are low on gems.

While the developers could have been up front with how the game works, I really doubt there is an “intentional ploy to get players to spend money on this “free” game.” If you have ever played a game on Facebook there should be nothing tricky about anything they are trying to do. Treasures of Montezuma Blitz is a blast, if you looking for a game to play in small bursts. But if that is not what you are looking for, go play Lumines Electronic Symphony it is probably more up your alley.