The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
You Must Build A Boat
We have basically been doing just one thing around TouchArcade Headquarters this week: Building the crap out of boats. It’s what we do. It’s what we were born to do. EightyEight Games’ You Must Build A Boat ($2.99) is the sequel to 2012’s 10000000 ($2.99), a game that redefined the tired match-3 genre. In a similar way, You Must Build A Boat has re-redefined (is that even a thing?) the genre once again, and as special as the first game was for me and many others, it’s hard to go back after spending time with the vastly superior sequel.
One of the brilliant things about 10000000 was its compulsion loop. You’d start a run, go until you couldn’t go any longer, then head back to your home base with new ways to improve your skill sets, allowing you to get just a bit farther the next time you went out. Rinse and repeat that formula until at last you were capable of scoring 10,000,000, which pretty much signaled the end of an incredibly satisfying gaming experience.
You Must Build A Boat has a very similar compulsion loop, but some bits have been tweaked and it makes all the difference. The biggest change is that you can now make cascading matches, meaning you can continue to make matches while other matches are clearing from the board. It sounds like a small change, but it’s crazy how much it improves the feel of the game. It makes what was already a fast-paced game even faster, but more fluid and natural-feeling too. Check out this trailer where developer Luca Redwood discusses some of the changes about how dungeons work in You Must Build A Boat.
It’s easy to look at You Must Build A Boat and think “that looks exactly like 10000000“, and in many ways that’s true. However, there are tons of little details and changes to appreciate in You Must Build A Boat over its predecessor that make it a much better game overall. The bottom line though, is that if you liked 10000000 even just a little bit, you need You Must Build A Boat in your life immediately. Not only is it damn fun and nearly impossible to put down, but it’s also a remarkable example of how there’s still room to improve and refine a genre no matter how overdone it may seem. Yes, even the match-3 genre.
