Game Impressions Yowza! I just got to do a couple of initial run throughs of the game and this is PURE Abstract Resource Juggling Puzzley Fun! At its most base level the game is about killing skulls to gain experience and level up for better stats and skills. Draw a continuous path through some skulls and swords will damage or kills those nasty bastages. Each turn the skulls are allowed to stay on the board they'll damage your armor and character himself. These twits start off pretty harmless as like little gnats, but later on they will likely be able to withstand a couple of attacks and will each be able to do much more damage to you. But, of course it isn't THAT simple. There are potions to collect if you need to heal up, shields to collect to both repair and upgrade your equipment, coins you can use to buy better equipment. There also is a lot of strategic resource juggling...like you could kill the two skulls on the board now or, as you currently can see a path that would net you a huge desperately needed health boost. Another fun aspect is the game's skills. These are almost akin to Puzzle Quest spells. These skills can do any number of useful things although most seem to be based on collecting a certain tile type or converting a given tile type to another (i.e. Disarm which will turn all skulls currently on the board into swords). They cost nothing to cast/use, but depending on how potent the skill, will have a commensurate cool down period (number of turns you'll need to wait before you can use it again). So if you want to stay alive long in the game you'll need to level up, get the best equipment possible, use your skills strategically for the biggest effect, and wisely choose the best equipment upgrades to complement your style of play. Lastly, just so I can't be accused of misleading anyone, realize there is only the one enemy type nor any story but the opening little blurb before the game starts. Once you finally succumb to the never ending hordes of skulls, you'll be presented with a nice detailed breakdown of how long you played, baddies killed, skills gained, final gear, etc. with your resulting score. Your top 10 local scores are kept in a Hall of Fame that also, via near microscopic icons, will show your ending gear and skills. While I'm cool with there just being the one generic enemy, the skulls, I think it might be fun to give them some unique skills/abilities. Like poisonous Green Skulls, Experience Draining Purple Skulls, Armor Rusting Orange Skulls, etc. These skulls would still be eliminated and grouped with any other colored skulls just as before but when a player sees among the generic skulls and orange guy mixed in there he'll know that in addition to the normal damage he'll be suffering EXTRA armor damage until he takes that twit out. Good Fun 5/5!
Sorry but you realize Steve Jobs holds me captive in his basement and MAKES me hype up all of these silly games against my will!
Damn it, now I want the game too. Without having played the game I can agree with LordGek's sentiment of doing small twists on the enemy, so as to make them feel less generic to the player. I have a question, though: do you gain anything, that carries over into new games? If the game relies purely on player progression, I'm not sure it's for me.
Nope! In good the good ol' Roguelike form, once you die that's it and you'll start your next game from scratch (all of your gear goes to the grave with you).
I think the price point of the game is a little steep, compared to other titles on the Store. $1.99 would probably be the sweet spot, though I'm hoping it'll go on sale some time, so I can snatch it up for cheap. I'll be keeping it on my AppShopper
About time! I love the game's pacing as well. The monsters initially seem so harmless. You can have a few on the screen pounding on you and they won't even get past your pathetic armor allowing you to focus more on building up your money and equipment upgrades...but sooner than later those little bastages will start coming in larger groups and doing some significant damage requiring a massive mind shift. Realize that while sometimes you might want to clear the screen of extra potions even when uninjured or link up some swords even without any skulls but you'll gain nothing for it (even if you don't need the health, until you clear them out these are just tiles taking up vital space).
I have a question about equipment upgrades! Are the equipment upgrades tied to specific pieces of equipment? Like say I opted for the +1 Vit upgrade to my shield, am I safe in assuming that +1 Vit would be lost the second I replace the shield? This seems kind of obvious but then again gets confusing when applied to something like "Potions" which aren't really tied to the equipment you might trade in at the shop.
Yep, upgrades are tied to whichever piece of equipment you apply them to, but adding more upgrades to equipment also makes you more likely to find better equipment in the shop. For example, applying 2 life leech and 1 strength upgrade to a sword will make it possible to buy a +3 damage sword from the shop (if you're lucky), so upgrades aren't entirely wasted when you replace items, and there's usually a tradeoff between keeping your upgrades or getting a large boost to damage/armor. Depending on the item, upgrades can also sometimes persist onto new items you buy from the shop. The Potion that you're upgrading is actually a type of item you can buy at the shop, the fifth item type is "trinket", and this can be a ring, amulet or potion, etc. These can have a wide variety of miscellaneous upgrades (not +damage or +armor) and are most likely to maintain their upgrades when being traded in the shop. That's a great idea, I had toyed around with the idea of having different types of enemies but ultimately it seemed like it would get a bit confusing if there's constantly a half dozen different types of enemies onscreen. The way you describe it though, it could work - if the special enemies were more rare and the normal ones were still predominant, the player would have to make a an effort to get them off the grid and wouldn't get tired of constantly having to clear out the specials. I'll add this to the list of changes for next update
Cool, I just confirmed before seeing your reply that my really beefed up items tended to get more enhanced trade-in options! These specials could be rare and have all sorts of variants from special damage (damaging something other than health), Boss/Unique (more damage and defense than the average skull at this point), or even weaker attacks than average skulls with special immunities to compensate for their sticking around longer (immune to tile transmuting skills or can only be taken that way). Basically you have such a cool roguelike vibe I'd love to see special abilities for the beasties worked in there (and as this might add more complexity to the game, use the player's chosen difficulty to determine the frequency of specials as well as which set to draw from with some of the more annoying guys only in Normal+, and super nasty only in Hard). Also you might want to add a little something to defeating one of them besides extra exp, maybe a little cash or armor repair (erm, with all of the Boss' dying slime coating your armor it somewhat repaired itself?).
Yep, you're right, the special/boss monsters would definitely add a lot to the gameplay, will definitely try to add them in, hopefully in the coming week
Loving this game so far. Killed the battery on the phone twice with it today. I finally got the hang of it and was feeling pretty invincible on normal at level 208, but I think I might have found a bug. When I started the game back up when I got home from work it has my base damage set back to +5 where it was quite high earlier (over 150 if I remember correctly). Im not sure if my other stats are off or not, it still shows my equipment. Is this a known issue?
Picked this game up based on the good opinions here and I have to agree, extremely fun game and manages to capture the roguelike "just 1 more try!" experience in a match 3 variant. Game play is fast, challenging but not frustrating, the interface is smooth, you can resume games and the vast amount of upgrades and loot keep you coming back.
Wow...another vote for this game rocks. I am really surprised at the complexity of this game, and how choosing your skill ups, items, item boosts, and new skills really change the game each time you play. In one game just now I was using regen+spikes as an overall tactic. In another, I was using the turn all potions into exp, which would often result in lots of swords and skulls dropping, and then I would follow up with a skill that let me get gold for all kills. Worked really well. Great game. And I can see a lot of potential for future updates. I would really like to see game center high score support for this also. I think you should consider it, as I believe that the little game center tag on games helps boost sales too.
Game Impressions I can't stop these silly ideas from coming out! New Special (my universal name for these enhanced guys) idea: Kamikaze Bomber: This would be a red skull that shows up with a number on his face (maybe "5"). This will count down 1 each turn. If killed in a move before reaching 0 it will blow up the adjacent pieces like an exploding potion (so actually kind of handy) but if allowed to count down to 0...it won't be so pretty. If he reaches 0 he will blow up on his own and take HALF of your current hp (to be most fair I suggest all other monster damage be calculated first and this halving being of the remaining hp)! In the case of multiple Bombers going off, this half of current hps would be halved again (the idea being that the bombers will never kill you on their own). The player will still get the benefit of blown up tiles either way so at least there is some payback to losing half your hps. New Skills (Special related): Banish: A special on the field will be killed (random or should we allow player to target which one?). Exorcism: All Specials currently on the field are transformed to normal dudes. (not sure which name is best) Talent Scout/Risk Taker/Big Game Hunter: Convert one of the current normals to a random Special (this assumes that Specials give a nice bonus in xp, gold, or something over normals so that there would be an incentive to do this). Lastly, a new enhancement possible for equipment if the Kamikaze is added: Kevlar: Renders player immune to blast effects
One consideration before you start adding a lot of features to the game that fundamentally change it: keep a version of this base game the way it is. In other words, perhaps have two modes of the game, classic (just like it is now) and evolving, which would be the place where lots of new ideas go.
Always a good idea as these extra creatures would add a lot of complexity to an otherwise pretty elegant/clean game.
