Review: Marvel Puzzle Quest Dark Reign

Ported from Android is the PC release of Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign.  This game is free to play and is… interesting.

Where do we start.  Well… it’s only sort of Marvel.

A lot of stuff about it is just wonky and weird.  As an example Iron Man is a very arrogant character.  His arrogance is in his speech and how confident he is about everything.  Nick Fury has a very similar personality.

It seems like they’ve transformed Iron Man into a Spider-Man clone.  All of his talk is all jokes that are honestly… not that funny.

But aside from that you have some really strong Marvel representation.  You start off with Iron Man and quickly gain, Black Widow, Storm, and Hawkeye who are all favorites among people.

So it’s free to play, what are you buying here?

There are so far $150 worth of packages you can buy for this game.  These packages come with points.

There are two different types of points.  The golden ones are used for upgrading and acquiring new abilities or heroes.  The purple points are used to level up your hero.

Now both of these can be acquired by playing.  But they have some pretty serious restrictions.  Your heroes will take damage and as they do it can only be healed up over time.  You can speed this up by using a heal pack.

Heal packs can be earned or they can be bought.  But eventually you will hit a brick wall.  For me this brick wall came after an hour and a half of play.

So be warned, you’re not buying a game that can be played consistently.  It is a free to play title designed for casuals which will cost a lot of money to finish very quickly.

So what is the game, well it’s Puzzle Quest… which is just another form of Bejeweled.

There is an interesting twist though, you are playing it against someone.  You both get turns and as you clear out gems you gain gems as a resource.  Certain gems can be used to use powers that can be used strategically to neutralize an enemy’s abilities or deal damage and take a lead.

As you level up you gain more health and deal more damage to the enemy.

There is even this kind of odd way you can select three heroes to use powers of and they all have their own powers.  Whatever hero you pick moves to the front and is targeted for your attacks.  Whichever of your heroes moves to the front is targeted by the enemy.

The game has a tonne of free content.  There is 150 free puzzles to solve all with different powers being used and strengths.

But as you take health it doesn’t regenerate for the next part so you have to slowly progress through the story or pay money.

The game itself is fun and addictive but the free to play noose is really hard to get over.  If you can sit down and play this game for an hour a day you might be able to do this fine.  But the whole leveling process can be traded in for money.

The big thing I can’t get over is just how damned greedy this publisher is.

Bejeweled sold for $5.  Bejeweled 2 sold for $10.  They made tones of money off of both of those games…. actually a billion dollars in sales between the two games.

This publisher didn’t sell this game for that price though.  They are charging outrageous prices to try and get as much money out of you.

The game even feels designed that you have no choice but to spend.  You are playing against an AI and they can just make moves up on the spot to quickly deplete your health bar.

Bejeweled had some planning and some tactics.  You could look at the jewels on the map and decide and plan moves to try and setup some mega combo.  In this game the computer can just make up their own mega combo.

The powers are mostly random… except when the computer uses them.  When the computer uses them they are completely planned and have no randomness.  It all comes down to level and grinding and unfortunately this game will lack a lot of staying power for most.

Steam Sales Review #74: Prince of Persia

Ten years ago Ubisoft bought the rights to the Prince of Persia franchise.  They hired on the original developer of the game and got to work on a master re-imaging of the series.  The result was overwhelming praise from everyone.  Everyone who played the game loved it and bragged about how great it was.

Despite this, the market reported something really different.  Despite being one of the greatest games ever made, it only saw 3.5M sales.  To compare Halo: Combat Evolved saw 6.5M sales.

When Halo 2 came out their sales doubled.  When Prince of Persia: Warrior Within saw almost half as many sales as the original game.

The Prince of Persia “Sands” franchise saw roughly 1,000,000 devoted fans which was enough to keep pushing out titles, but not enough to improve the series.

Eventually they decided that they would “refresh” the series again and in 2007 we saw a re-imagining with a brand new art style.

I have to say this new art style is absolutely breathtaking.

So why did this game overwhelmingly do so poorly?

This review is a list of gaming defects that stop the game from being the greatest puzzler that ever lived.

#1 Difficulty

One of the major design elements of this game that has made massive waves in the industry is the idea that death was a mechanic designed to get children to throw quarters at an arcade machine.

So this game removed the sand dagger that would give you one chance to re-do what you just screwed up and gave you Elika, a Princess who had magical powers that would save you every single time you died.

This mechanic is excellent.  Ever played I Wanna be the Guy or I Wanna Be the Boshy?  These are really cheap looking indie titles that are hyper difficult but always set you to automatically re-appear every single time you die.

By having no death it means you can scale up that difficulty to ridiculous ways.

But Prince of Persia (whose franchise is known for hard games) didn’t scale up the difficulty one bit.  The whole game you were being slow pitched and when you get to the difficult part of the game… it is very very short.

This was a huge lost opportunity here.

#2: Non-Linear Puzzle Game

Ask yourself this question, how many non-linear puzzle games are there out there.

If you’re left scratching your head the answer is, none.  There are none… at least not successful ones.

The reason why puzzle games are linear is because they are supposed to scale up in difficulty over time allowing you to sequentially make things more complicated and make the solutions that much harder to get to.

But when you have a game that isn’t linear it means you have to slow ball pitch all the content to the player.  It means there is no reasonable point for you to adjust that difficulty rating until you get to the end of the game.

There is a hipster gamer boogie man that cries how bad linear games are.  In truth, many game formats just fit as being linear.

What can be non-linear is puzzle design and puzzle solutions.  It is possible to have possibles that have multiple solutions.

HOWEVER, puzzles with multiple solutions tend to be easier and thus less fun for a puzzler.

#3: Lacking Puzzles

A puzzle game should have puzzles.

At first looks it would appear this is a jumping puzzle game.  Almost all puzzle platformers involve getting in somewhere or getting out of somewhere.  This game at its core should be a puzzle platformer in which you have to get somewhere.  But it’s not.  When you hit your magic button a path is revealed to you telling you exactly what path you have to use to get somewhere.

The pathing indicator was REALLY cool and really well implemented… but it took away from the solving bit.  It meant that the actual puzzles which involved moving parts became the only puzzles.

And this game had three puzzles total.  It just needed to have more puzzles and more stuff for people o try and solve.

Just having three puzzles wouldn’t have been so bad… if it didn’t only take me 2 minutes to solve each one.

#4: Dat Story

The most notorious thing about this game on PC is the story.  If you play on console you get all this lovely DLC that makes the story better and expands it.

But if you played the game on PC, you are likely to just hate the story.

The game runs about 10 hours long.  The story goes like this, 30 minutes in you find a man with his donkey named Farah (a throwback because Farah was the name of the woman from the original reboot).  The man runs into the princess, saves her, and is enthralled in an adventure to stop an evil god.

9 hours take place in which nothing is really happening except for random shots of what is happening and a few back story elements to some villains.

And then you get to the end of the game in which the awful ending explains away everything in seconds.

It was just really really bad.  On top of that… you are very likely going to be upset about the ending which was designed entirely to make DLC viable…. and there’s no DLC.

#5: No DLC

One of my biggest complaints about this game is… it’s actually a great game.

Yeah you didn’t see that one coming, did ya Internet

No it’s a really spectacular game that has no bugs, is really smooth, and the parkor and art style is amazing.

But with that being said the fact that there is no DLC on PC is very bad.  The single DLC pack on console was really unpopular because of how difficult it was.

But had that DLC pack been tagged on to the game or given for free, the main game would have been far more worth playing.

But without the DLC available on PC, it’s not worth the time.  If the entire game can be solved in less time than it takes to solve an average puzzle in another game… there’s a serious problem.

It’s a real shame that so many great game mechanics are gone to waste and that there couldn’t be another 30-40 hours worth of DLC available.

But that just ends up being the case.

Without Internet I Review: Jewel Quest 3

Well it’s time for some Bejeweled like action again.  This time it’s Jewel Quest 3 from iWin.  I guess these guys got lucky on the copyright infringement battle by making one minor innovation to the format to make sure they’re not overlapping too much with PopCap Games’ Bejeweled.

So the game features the exact same action as Bejeweled.  You match up three jewels and you clear them.  It even features Bejeweled’s combo noises in which if you hit clusters of three in a row you get bonus noises.

But unlike Bejeweled chaining them together actually doesn’t matter at all.

The major distinction between this game and Bejeweled is what you do.  In Bejeweled you get points and progress.

In this game you have to clear a set of jewels in every single space.  Each space you clear will turn gold.  So the goal becomes simply clearing all of the spaces.

It’s a simple game in which the challenge ramps up very quickly.  Unlike Bejeweled in which you have to start from the beginning this one allows you to start off where you left off, an important distinction.

If I was to say which is better I’d feel this one was the better of the two games.  Definite thumbs up for casual game lovers.

Without Internet I Review: Zuma’s Revenge

“Hurry” Pop Cap Games yells,” Bejeweled Sales are decreasing and we need another jewel type game to sell these suckers!”

“Bejeweled 2?”

“Great thinking but you know it’s already in production!”

“Bejeweled Deluxe?”

“Great thinking we’ll add it to our roster, any other ideas?”

“How about Snood with gems?”

“What did you just say?”

“Snood with gems…?”

“BRILLIANT, PUT IT IN PRODUCTION NOW!”

And so Zuma’s Revenge was born on that day.

In Zuma’s Revenge you are a random frog who defies a god… who has four Godly brothers who are also looking to get this frog.  Zuma is the first boss of the game.

A group of gems or beads are pushed along a path.  As a frog you have gems in your mouth.  After you match up three gems you destroy those gems.  If the gems reach the mouth of the god you are facing you lose.

The game features the Bejeweled comboing system that highly incentivizes hitting those combos.  It also includes random gems that can act as bombs when activated, reverse the bead pathing, or slow it down.

Much like Bejeweled and Bejeweled 2 and Snood and Snood 2… this game suffers from not being fun but being highly addictive.  I realized when I was on Level 35 and had not yet eaten that I was truly in danger here.

Zuma’s Revenge is a great time waster… but that’s it.  Much like every other game it’s like, it doesn’t actually get more complicated or diverse.  The different ascending levels will give increased challenge but once you’re done wasting time… you’ll have no use but to start over.

I’d highly recommend this for mobile devices and iPads.  I would not recommend this to replace any game on the PC.

It seems like a great game for computer illiterate mom and pop who are still playing that Snood you gave them ten years ago.

Time to get with the times mom and pop… its Zuma’s Revenge time.

Review: Revenge of the Pigs

ANGRY PIGS!

For whatever reason Rovio decided they didn’t want to develop an Angry Birds for Blackberry.  So someone else did.  Instead of having birds fly however they awkwardly decided to make pigs fly.  Instead of attacking birds they would attack wolves (three little piggies).

Sometimes this game is referred to as “Angry Pigs” but for all intensive purposes it is Revenge of the Pigs.

So what of ROTP (as I’ll be calling it) ?

The game plays exactly like Angry Birds in every single considerable way.  One advantage is there tends to be far more play value out of it.

While most people can beat Angry Birds within a couple of hours this game will take the best players in the range of 5-6 hours.  Much like Angry Birds it has expansions that offer about an extra 30 minutes to one hour of gameplay.

The game comes with at base 4 50 level zones.  Each zone has a theme that quickly goes away and it just becomes tedious puzzle solving.

One of the things about this game that is bad is the horrible controls on most Blackberry mobile device.  The concept of aiming and seeing while on a Torch was painful.  Having handed my phone to my girlfriend she immediately identified this problem.

Anti-wolf culture continues

The game also comes with a daily cheat that you can stockpile.  Cheats often involve that guide that comes standard in Angry Birds, larger amounts of damage and a few other things that seem to be useless.

The game transforms a lot into trial and error in which you pull your birds back and just hope to figure out the right possible combination.  Many levels are designed in obtuse ways in which you just will not be able to do it in one shot.

Stars (much like Angry Birds) are also kind of odd.  Three stars is often granted for earning less points and 1 star almost seems impossible to obtain.

The game is well priced and a cheap pick up.  However it is only really worth purchasing as on a mobile phone. On a playbook or tablet there are simply far better games to get than this one.