Flora's Enchanted Garden is a slow-paced blaster, simply tapping bugs in a garden to keep them from eating a growing vine. Quest for the Codex's other three mini-games are forgettable, though. And solid too is Tecna-Logic, the Pipe Dream clone that tasks you to complete a circuit pathway before an electrical charge reaches the end of the line. This one uses the stylus to select and play an array of instruments. The game alternately switches input styles to take advantage of the touch screen, presented the familiar DDR Dance Pad layout on the screen and encouraging you to "dance with your fingers." Musa, the rhythm-themed Winx girl, has a similar mini-game - Rhythm Jam. The former include Dance Floor, Layla's mini-game that emulates DDR with falling arrow icons activated by button presses. Mystical energies are apparently best harnessed by playing Dance Dance Revolution, or a knock-off of the classic puzzler Pipe Dream (both are the basis of mini-game designs here). Out of nowhere any of the girls may choose to announce that she's run out of Winx (magical power) and needs to build some back up. It's the random mini-game stops during the adventure that are confusing. Flying through various environments and blasting baddies while cutscenes continue this story makes sense. The story of the game finds friends Bloom, Tecna, Stella, Musa and Flora - the five members of the Winx Club - meeting up with a new pal, Layla, and joining her quest to save a group of kidnapped pixies. It does so as something of a hybrid - the core gameplay here is a take on shooters, but intermixed between the main flying levels are a handful of DS-exclusive mini-games.
Winx Club: Quest for the Codex marks the first time the female-focused Winx Club cartoon has come to the DS.
In this release, coming from that same major publisher, there's a bit of a change.
That's the side-scrolling shooter genre most people know, built on the foundation of series like Gradius, from Konami. Some sleek, high-tech starfighter with upgradeable weapons and shields, blasting off through a set of forced-scroll stages.