I’ve been a fan of this developer for a very long time. Their unique take on world building coupled with simple,addictive mechanics are a fun combination.Like most Game Stew games, the economy is very unforgiving, I had to delete and reinstall the game four times to reset my economy until I found a build path that let me finish the game.This isn’t their funnest offering, but I enjoyed it and - as always - I eagerly anticipate their next release.

The devs did a great job with the theme and visual design, but the gameplay mechanics offer very little room for skill or strategy. This is mostly due to the enemy’s attacks being so unpredictable. This game’s main mechanic is about increasing the power of tiles by matching 3, but you get only 4 moves per round, so you also need to line things up for the next round. HOWEVER, the enemy’s attacks are unpredictable, and affect many tiles. Basically every round the enemy destroys about 10-20% of the tiles on the board, which are replaced by random tiles. HOWEVER, the random tiles increase in value the further you are in the encounter. SO, part of the strategy is maximizing the number of replaced tiles so you keep getting relevantly powerful tiles, as any earlier tiles become too hard to upgrade due to the random destruction every round. This means that your early attempts to line things up for good combinations are basically irrelevant, as thats alot of effort for relatively low tier results, while random new tiles are higher level by default. ULTIMATELY, you are far more reliant on RNG than you are on skill and planning, which basically ruins this game and turns it into a low skill low effort tapping timekiller.

So far, this game has not felt like a great $3 spent. The tutorial is pretty minimal and there is what feels like quite a bit of RNG. It’s quite possible that I just don’t understand what’s going on, but I cannot seem to identify any enemy patterns or ways around the difficulty and issues at hand. On top of that, the first secret weapon they have you unlock has been unable to deploy for me since unlocking it. Once again, I cannot find any direction on how to properly deploy it. It’s all rather confusing. I will keep trying it out though to see if I can figure out what’s going on.