After working on the violent and mature themed Hitman game, two members of the development team switched gears and embarked on a journey into the casual gaming world by forming The Game Equation. Following a similar theme of change, the studio's 2008 debut Deep Blue Sea blended match-three style gameplay with a tale about an advertizing executive named Jessica who ditches her day job to become a deep sea treasure hunter. Two years of polish and hard work have made their follow-up aquatic puzzle adventure all the more impressive.
Scheduled to launch next month, Deep Blue Sea 2 is the second game from Danish studio The Game Equation and the follow-up to 2008's match-3 Deep Blue Sea. While it's almost unheard of to spend two whole years developing a sequel in the world of casual PC downloads, the developers of Deep Blue Sea 2 have put that time to good tweaking the gameplay and even adapting one of casual gaming's most popular genres - hidden object - into the match-3 mix. Read on for Gamezebo's hands-on impressions of the game's first few levels.
Even the most well-worn of genres can seem new again in the right hands, and Deep Blue Sea is solid proof of that. A debut title from The Game Equation (a studio founded by two of the programmers who worked on Eidos Interactive's Hitman), Deep Blue Sea takes the match-three formula made popular by Bejeweled and its ilk and makes it its own thanks to the right balance of clever power-ups, challenging levels, and good production values.