Today has been a day filled with Zynga news, so it’d only make sense to end it with a gameplay video of their latest title, Matching With Friends (Free). It’s basically Words With Friends (Free) but without the words. You match strips of colored bricks to score as much as you can before passing a turn to your friend and they do the same.
Matching With Friends has a pretty crazy free to play mechanic which you’ll see in the video. Essentially, as long as you have coins, you can just keep swapping pieces forever. The piece swapping is useful in a pinch, but, as you’ll see, you can just keep spraying coins Zynga’s way until you’ve got exactly what you need to totally turn the tide of the game in your favor which seems… weird.
Nice video! Makes it look better than that screenshot.
Now, blow the view up to near-full-screen and add iCade support and I’d definitely be interested!
I don't agree with that it's ugly, it's retro, the writer obviously forgot that.
It can be both ugly and retro. And it is. I think that's the point.
There is a difference between retro and ugly. People seem to think a bad art style can be called retro to instantly excuse it, but there is good retro and bad retro. This is bad retro.
I'd say this review is really accurate.
So, YOU don't like it. That doesn't make it objectively bad, imo.
I find the art style to be great, personally. Retro or not. There is character in the limited set of pixels, the color choices and structures of the "sprites" are evocative of what they are, where they are, what they do to you, what might happen if you shoot them. On top of that, like all good pixel art it forces players to imagine details and fill in their own interpretation.
The only "bad" retro art I can think of is stuff that is not thought out and doesn't accomplish what I laid out above. Random bits of sloppy artwork with no injection of purpose or thought. The graphics in this game, from what I've played so far, are well crafted and full of character.
Did they ever fix those game breaking map design flaws?
What should I be looking for when I play?
You can get stuck pretty easily, with no escape except to delete your save file. Still hasn't been fixed as far as I can tell.
I don't find the actual game ugly at all. It reminds me of early computer game graphics in a very good way. In fact, I love how the smallest set of pixels is suggestive enough to really delineate different parts of the map, suggest what will kill you and what will be safe and even set different tones. The music is just as boiled down and minimalist and yet effectively supports the game.
I think the interface is ugly though. The buttons and the "backdrop" around the game screen. It's distracting, imo. (I'd almost rather see a photo realistic late 70's looking hardware around the screen, maybe even the buttons looking like actual keyboard keys.)
The controls and movement, however, are SPOT ON and fun as suggested. Comparing the jumping to the floaty, boring, squishy frustration of Sackboy-jumping is an insult to this game, though, even if it was intended as a complement. (Or maybe LBP 2 fixed this and I never knew? I'm judging on the original LBP.)
Anyway, I'm always curious how successful these types of ultra retro hardcore games are because I'm loving this one and if I thought it would be profitable I'd start developing one or two.
Yeah I don't know it calling it ugly is fair. It's the reviewer's opinion though. I just think a word like ugly rather than simple (it's not unbearable to look at for long periods of time), undersells the fact that its a fantastic little adventure. I think the visuals along with the music, add to what I kind of feel is an odd menacing world that you explore.
I thought the art direction of the game was spot on. I concede to the author as art is subjective but I'd agree with an earlier post that simple would have been a better choice of wording than ugly. Journalistically speaking anyway.
I would say the art is actually inspired. Given the limited playing area and pixel resolution, this game has made me feel anxious, fearful, alone, lost, excited, joyous, regretful...you get the point. Before writing this I really thought long about the big budget games I own and they don't do that...period. Perhaps my imagination is more robust than others, being that we are talking about subjective viewpoints, and I just "get" what the dev was laying down. That said, I had no trouble figuring out just by looking that I shouldn't jump in the shifting LAVA...it looked like lava to me.
To be fair, I grew up on Metroid. My NES took no end of abuse by the time I frustratingly made it through that game. Hell, Metroid 2 only had 4 different colors to work with.
The point to all this rambling is this. If you are on the fence about this game because of the art style buy it. Right now. Don't even read the rest of my over-opinionated brain spew.
It's all the frustration through the journey that makes beating a game feel so fulfilling. I've been a gamer for a long time and games like this are the few I play yearly for the way they make me feel throughout the adventure.
Cool...go buy now!
Fantastic little retro game! Well-worth the two bucks.