Kill Ten Rats

Following up on Sunday’s post, our old friends at Frogdice wanted to mention that they also have a fantasy-themed match-3 game called Tower of Elements. It is a tower defense game, a genre of which I am a fan.

I have played the demo but am not tempting myself with a new tower defense game just before a conference. I’m not sure how well it clicks in the first ten levels. It’s match-3 gameplay. I’d look at how that varies in the late game, but after you beat the tutorial you don’t get the option of seeing anything except the credits, so I can’t see what I’m missing by not buying. You need to match tiles in the right row to attack the enemy, which is rather particular for small monsters like rats. It seemed to go well with the strategy of “spam matches at the bottom of the tower, and other matches up top will just happen.” Vertical matches were more useful for covering ground, but I imagine the later levels have enemies who need many hits and who might care about what element you use to attack.

Tile drops happen instantly, and I never realized how satisfying it was to have the next row of tiles fall into place until I did not have it. You know that moment when you get a big chain and tiles just keep falling into place? Thunk, next, thunk, next, thunk. Of course, you might really hate that if you were waiting on the chain to get your next fireball going. Instead, you get huge waves of those fireballs when you do set off a big chain, which is satisfying in a different way. Either the demo is rigged or it is really easy to get chains with five tile colors.

“Click on the gold in the next few seconds or you lose your treasure” is a game mechanic pet peeve of mine, but the items you could buy with gold seemed unimportant when you could spam walls of fireballs. I never used an item outside the tutorial, but they are one of the mechanics to deal with “there’s a rat on the bottom row and I don’t have 3 to match down there.”

The art and sound are not carrying much of the weight. It is not adding much or causing a distraction. It is not appealing to nostalgia with pixelated art, which I appreciate considering how many small publishers are doing that lately.

Frogdice also wanted to offer a 50% off code: CFXR000QV

: ZUbon

link

A variation on the Bejeweled “match 3” formula, you are gradually escaping from a dungeon. It plays a bit like Warriors End, although you are plowing through monsters rather than fighting one opponent. You also collect crafting materials to upgrade. Graphics and music fit the 8-bit standard so popular as “retro” at the moment.

This could be amusing on a mobile platform, but it does not offer a lot if you sit down to play for a block of time. Like Bejeweled, once you understand how the system and its few specials work, you have mastered the game. There is not much Raph Koster fun here, but it is a small variation on a comfortingly (or stultifyingly) familiar formula. Running the dungeon would pass a bus ride nicely, but it will not satisfy an itch for deeper play.

I found myself disappointed by the treadmill nature of the upgrades. You know this formula from MMOs: enemy hit points rise at least as quickly as your weapon damage, so your numbers increase but you do not become more powerful. Many flash games with similar upgrade systems make the improvements still feel meaningful by sending you through the weak enemies before getting to the big ones; that can feel boringly repetitious, but you really do notice when your Super Upgraded Sword clears ten enemies in less than a second and you zip through, rather than starting somewhere level-appropriate so every monster still takes the same amount of time despite your thousands of gold pieces spent at the blacksmith.

On sale at Steam for a couple of days as I post this. A full playthrough has a few hours of content; going for all the achievements will take longer, especially since there are two for low level runs. With the game’s upgrade and score systems, I’m pretty sure you can get those two by upgrading slowly, carefully keeping your score low, then sprinting for 10,000,000 all at once (and start over completely if you get a good but not perfect score that ends the “low level” part).

: Zubon

1. The business cannot expect customer loyalty. Get as much out of him/her as you can while you can.
2. The customer sees the business trying to exploit him/her as much as possible as quickly as possible. The customer feels no loyalty.
3. Go to 1.

Charities can operate much the same way: past donors are likely future donors, but someone who is “thinking about donating” will probably still be thinking about it a year from now. Keep returning to that well.

As a blood donor, I am troubled.

: Zubon