Following the reveal of the Amazon Fire Phone was a few exclusive games that looked surprisingly awesome. Saber’s Edge (Free) was one of those games, which seemed to combine puzzle mechanics, RPG elements, and… Pirates. On paper, it sounded amazing, and as someone who loves puzzle RPGs, it got me pretty close to picking up a Fire Phone just to try it out. Well, the Amazon Fire Phone completely bombed, which eventually resulted in these exclusive games being released on other platforms. It’s been soft launched for a while, but as of this morning Saber’s Edge is now available worldwide.

I played the game quite a bit during its lengthy soft launch, and the core gameplay is really cool. Unfortunately, it greatly suffers from … free to play mobile game released in 2016 syndrome, for lack of a better way to put it. What I mean by that is the puzzle battle mechanic is totally awesome and lives up to what I was excited for when I first heard about the game.

The problem is, you can’t just release a game with a strong puzzle mechanic, charge ten bucks for it, and live happily ever after. Instead, you take that mechanic, and drench it with all sorts of different free to play shenanigans, unlocks, currencies, collectables, upgrades, and everything else that every free to play game seems to have. It makes me happy we got Dungeon Raid ($0.99) when we did, as this makes me wonder if even Dungeon Raid if released in 2016 would be packed with all this junk.

I don’t mean to sound too negative, as there’s a cool game to be found somewhere inside of Saber’s Edge, provided you’re willing to deal with the rest of the stuff which had oddly become “normal" recently.