In the small town where I grew up, my parents run a little single-screen movie theatre called the Sunset. We spent a few years living in an apartment above it when I was a kid, and my first job was taking tickets at the box office. I still love going there when I visit my parents, even though I don’t always stay to watch the shows (which only play on weekends, of course.) Movie theatres are familiar and comfortable to me, and spending most of my life around one instilled me with a deep love and appreciation of movies and filmmaking in general. The folks at Jamwix seem to feel exactly the same way, and it shows in their latest app, CineMagic (Free).
It’s a pretty typical match three at its core, and if you’ve played Candy Crush (Free) or any of its millions of knock-offs you’ll feel right at home here. Each level presents you with a screen full of little icons that need to be swiped, swapped, and matched to clear as many as possible before you run out of moves. Instead of candy, you’ll mostly be dealing with fancy hats, typewriters, cameras, and other movie-making related objects.
Personally, I’ve never been too enamored with match three games, though. Nothing against them–they’re just not my jam. Luckily, CineMagic has a twist. (Not like a Sixth Sense or Memento twist, though. More like Who Framed Roger Rabbit–a clever spin on well-worn territory.) Instead of just passing levels through matching, you’ll also be creating original movies. Every movie is made up of seven elements, the game informs us: Two plots, two characters, two actors, and a location. Match enough typewriters, and you’ll be able to add a plot to your movie. Match enough of the little blue houses, and you’ve got a location.
On paper, it sounds like just another random gimmick to slightly distinguish it from the horde, but it actually works really well. In part this is due to the game really going all in on the idea, and it’s actually kind of surprising how deep the system goes. For example, you can’t just toss any random actors into any plot you like; each element (they’re called “cinebits”) is strong or weak in certain genres, and you have to be careful to make sure all the parts of your film fit together in a way that makes sense. If they don’t, the critics will hate it and audiences won’t pay to see it (which translates to a much lower score for you, of course).
As satisfying as the game mechanics are, though, the really enjoyable part (for me, anyway) is completing a movie that is just ridiculous. For example, I’ve had Nicolas Cage play a stripper and Maggie Smith play a janitor. And they were coming of age while battling an evil wizard on a fishing boat. (Of course, in CineMagic their names have to be Nicked Rage and Aggie Sith, but still.) After each level the game presents you with a poster for your movie and a short article in a Variety-style rag summarizing your film and how it did against the competition, and it’s all usually pretty absurd and hilarious. The game also includes a gallery in the menu with all your best (and worst) movies, so you can revisit the highs and lows of your career any time you like.
Another important aspect of the game is collecting the cinebits themselves. There are tons of plots (“defend outpost”, “unlikely lovers”), stars (“Sadam Handler”, “Zooey ByChanel”), locations (“deserted mall”, “futuristic metropolis”), and roles (“grizzled cop”, “pregnant parent”) that can all be used in your films once they’re unlocked or bought with in-game currency. There are also special cinebits that enhance your movie overall, like “epic dance sequence” and “hit soundtrack”. Each type can be upgraded to improve its stats and unlock more specific genres that help cinebits fit together (like “crime” and “indie”) and it all goes a pretty long way to making the game feel almost infinitely replayable.
So far, I think I’ve described a pretty awesome game. And it is, quite often. Unfortunately, it’s also ever-so-slightly janky. The menus feel slow at times, the cloud saves don’t seem to transfer everything from device to device (like currency and past movies in the gallery), and the “hint” that shows potential matches doesn’t seem to be aware when there’s a window covering the board. On top of that there are a few puzzling design choices, like the fact that you can’t exit out of certain windows (forcing you to make a choice with no option of canceling) and the fact that the aforementioned hint feature seems to have split personalities (sometimes flashing green on a match, and sometimes showing a cartoon hand pointing to matches) and can’t be turned off. Also, the gallery lets you switch from seeing your best movies to seeing your worst ones, but you can’t switch back.
There are tons of weird little quirks like that in CineMagic that make it feel like it maybe should have spent another month or two in the oven, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to play. Over time you learn to navigate around all the weird little bugs and puzzling UI decisions and just enjoy the game for what it is: a surprisingly strategic movie generator wrapped around decent match-three mechanics with lots of charm and personality. Like a favorite but flawed movie, you can recognize all of its shortcomings while still appreciating it for the spark of life at its center. And anyway, the price of admission here is free, so why not grab a ticket?
